Two Scientists Contend U.S. Suppressed Dolphin Studiesff
10 January 2003
United States
Two former government scientists who spent years investigating stress in dolphin populations charged this week that superiors at their federally financed laboratory shut down their research because it clashed with policy goals of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
The scientists, who worked at different times over the past decade at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, said their research indicated that the practice of chasing and encircling dolphins to catch tuna exposed the dolphins to dangerous amounts of stress.
The accusations, by Dr. Albert Myrick, a wildlife biologist, and Dr. Sarka Southern, a research associate, came days after the Bush administration relaxed the criteria for declaring tuna netted by Mexican and other foreign fishing boats to be "dolphin safe." In making that declaration last week, Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans said that chasing and corralling dolphins and the tuna that often accompany them into purse nets had "no significant adverse impact" on the dolphins.
The ruling cleared the way for Mexican and other Latin American tuna producers to place a dolphin-safe label on cans for American shelves. The foreign producers seek the designation — which many consumers demand — to be competitive with American companies, which do not chase dolphins to catch tuna.
But this week, Dr. Myrick said he decided in 1995 to retire from the center, which is part of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, after he was forbidden to continue his stress research. Dr. Southern, who helped pioneer the search for a molecular signature of stress, said that last year she was ordered to curtail her work after discovering signs of chronic stress in a large number of dolphins.
For nearly a decade, Clinton and Bush administration officials have sought to grant Mexico the dolphin-safe designation, as that government has taken steps to reduce dolphin kills.
Scientists studying dolphins in the waters off the coasts of Mexico and Central America have struggled to understand why the populations have failed to regenerate, even as mortality rates have sharply fallen, from hundreds of thousands a year to fewer than 3,000. A leading theory is that stress caused by the chase and netting — or the separation of cows from calves — has disrupted the dolphins' ability to reproduce.
In 1997, Congress ordered NOAA and the fisheries center to prepare a study to determine if the purse net fishing was harmful. A top official at the agency, William T. Hogarth, said the study, which was released last week, was "not conclusive." Officials at NOAA and the Commerce Department said there had been no effort to suppress research. The officials said that in the case of both scientists financing shortfalls and problems with peer reviews, not political considerations, ended their work. "We suppressed no research," said Dr. Michael Tillman, the director of the fisheries center.
Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said she would call for hearings in the Senate Commerce Committee to determine whether the Bush administration was running roughshod over the scientific evidence or suppressing research. Ms. Boxer, who wrote the original 1990 legislation that set out criteria for dolphin-safe fishing, said she would introduce a bill on Thursday seeking to overturn Mr. Evans's ruling.
Dr. Southern, a biophysical chemist, arrived at the fisheries center in 1998 under a grant to develop a technique for measuring stress in skin samples. After conducting an analysis on 900 dolphins, she established a link between animals that showed molecular evidence of stress and those that had been in most contact with the tuna fleets, she said.
But last February, her supervisor ordered her to withhold her findings, she said. "He came to my office and said that I have to understand that there's science and there's politics, and the politics dictates what sort of science can be used," Dr. Southern said. A few weeks later, Dr. Southern said, her research was terminated, and her laboratory was dismantled.
Stephen Reilly, who led the stress research at the center, said Dr. Southern's grant had expired. While her research was promising, he said, she ran into problems with the peer review process, with experts demanding more data. "We didn't have the money or the time," Mr. Reilly said.
Dr. Myrick, who was one of the first to study the indirect effects on dolphins of chase and capture, said he concluded in the mid-1990's that contact with tuna fishermen had resulted in lower pregnancy rates and the separation of calves from cows and otherwise had prevented the population from rebounding.
He said he was ordered to abandon his stress physiology project when Mexico was heavily lobbying the Clinton administration to relax its dolphin-safe rules. "They said, `No more, you can work on something else,' " Dr. Myrick said.
Dr. Tillman, the center's director, blamed severe budget cuts for curtailing the work. "There was no funding for the tuna-dolphin research at that time," he said.
