(Intro) Navy Environmental Impact Statement: Effect on Marine Mammals

A couple of weeks ago, the US Navy released their Environmental Impact Statement for the Hawaii and Southern California Training Complexes.  Here's a fairly good summary of the reaction all over the internet:

I had a friend (a scientist, but not a marine mammal person) contact me last week to find out more information, and I thought there would probably be more people out there that were wondering what the heck is going on.  I mean, that's a LOT of dolphins and whales that the Navy is, according to the SignOn petition "going to deafen."


The information from the petition is based on the Department of the Navy's Hawaii-Southern California Training and Testing Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)/Overseas Environmental Impact Statement (OEIS). Quite a mouthful, so I'm just going to call it the Navy EIS from now on. Environmental Impact Statements are required by the National Environmental Policy act (NEPA) of 1969, for actions that "significantly affect the human environment." They also provide information that demonstrates compliance with other environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.  If you look at the Navy's EIS, there is a chapter for the applicable different environmental laws.


The Marine Mammal Chapter of the Navy EIS is related to the National Marine Fisheries Service Letter of Authorization  to the U.S. Navy for Taking and Importing Marine Mammals (aka their permit). I haven't been able to dig up the application for this permit (which is more detailed), so I'm not sure if the text for the permit is exactly the same as the wording in the Navy's EIS. From what I've heard, the Marine Mammal Protection Act Permit won't be released to the public for another couple of months. Superficially, however, the EIS chapter looks a lot like the format I used in our lab's permit to research dolphins in Hawaii.


Let's take a look at the Navy EIS itself, and see what it says about the impact of Naval Activities on whales and dolphins.  These impacts include:

And these impacts will be occurring in the California and Hawaii range complexes, which cover quite a large area:

The area inside the red, blue, and yellow boxes, as well as the blue dotted line are where impacts will occur.

43 species of whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, and sea otters are known to occur in these areas. That's 7 species of baleen whale, 29 species of dolphin and toothed whale, 6 species of seal and sea lion, and a sea otter.

These are just the marine mammals in Hawaii.

There are descriptions of all the species individually (this takes a long time), along with their estimated population sizes, conservation status, management issues, and a short summary of specific threats to each species. Next, is a list an explanation of all the potential impacts.


I am going to take these one section at a time, and just skim over them. It's pretty detailed, and I'm not an expert in everything. I'm also not going to explain every single detail - if you want to know ALL the details, read it yourself.  However, if you read it and have any questions about something I left out, feel free to ask and I will address it to the best of my ability.


 Read on for more information:


Court Cases involving Naval Activities
Acoustics: What are the numbers of whales that may be affected by sound?

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