Blast from the Vast

Leave aside, for a moment, the question of why Ted Cranford wanted to perform a CT scan on the head of a sperm whale and consider instead how he could pull it off. First, of course, he would need a dead whale, preferably a young one that had beached itself on the coast of California near his home. Then he would need a device big enough to scan a 600-pound head. And he would have to figure out how to keep the head preserved until he could set up the scanning machinery.

Finding a whale turned out to be the easy part. One fall day, a newly dead infant sperm whale conveniently appeared on San Gregorio Beach, just south of San Francisco. Cranford was attending a scientific meeting in Bristol, England, at the time, but two friends who are marine-mammal veterinarians knew what he was looking for. They drove up Highway 1 from Santa Cruz, 30 miles to the south, cut through several feet of blubber, muscle, and bone, and scooped up the head with a front-end loader borrowed from a nearby lumber company. Cranford's friends dumped the head into the back of a pickup truck and drove it to the University of California at Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory, where they stashed it in a walk-in freezer. Then they sent him an urgent message to come home.

When Cranford began looking for funding to scan his whale head, several scientific agencies politely but firmly turned him down. The data would undoubtedly be of interest, they said, but the head of a sperm whale -- even a baby sperm whale -- simply could not be scanned.

Cranford, however, is a man not easily parted from his ideas. He is also handsome, with a thatch of unruly reddish brown hair and a carefully trimmed graying beard. He has small, even teeth behind fleshy lips, one blue and one hazel eye, and a penchant for wearing sneakers, shorts, and vibrantly colored Hawaiian shirts, even at scientific meetings. Now a 47-year-old adjunct professor of biology at San Diego State University, he is known as Grizz, short for grizzly bear, to friends and close associates from his undergraduate and graduate student days in Santa Cruz. The nickname describes not so much his demeanor as his ursine size and his habit of greeting friends with bear hugs.

In graduate school Cranford first used high-tech medical imaging to probe the anatomy of a mammal -- in that case a dolphin's head. Since then he has made it his mission to find out how toothed whales and dolphins make their sounds. It is a nontrivial question, as scientists like to say, meaning the answer is both significant and hard to get. Toothed whales, a group that comprises sperm whales and killer whales along with another six dozen species of lesser whales, porpoises, and dolphins, can emit a bewildering cacophony of noises underwater. Drop a hydrophone over the side of a boat in the middle of a school and you will hear, depending upon the species, anything from birdlike trills to whistles, squeaks, squawks, oinks, blats, and Bronx cheers.

The sounds Cranford is most interested in, and has spent the last two decades trying to understand, are the rapid-fire clicks toothed whales use for echolocation. A single click comes as an instantaneous burst of energy that usually lasts less than 1/10,000 of a second yet contains an astonishing range of frequencies, or pitches, most of which are too high for humans to hear. These intense packets of sound emerge from the animal's forehead as a focused beam, much like the light from a miner's headlamp. Many dolphins and whales seem to be able to narrow or widen the beam at will by deforming a lump of fat in their forehead, known as the melon, the way a glass lens can shape a cone of light. The animals are able to shift the loudness of a single click in order to penetrate farther into the water in front of them. Some clicks are loud enough to temporarily deafen a person.

Sperm whales make the loudest sounds of all. One of their clicks, if heard in the open air, would be much louder than the sound of a jumbo jet taking off. "It's the biggest and loudest damn biosonar source in the world," Cranford says. Just imagine a crack that lasts 1/10,000 of a second but can be picked up by hydrophones -- and heard by other sperm whales -- at a distance of 15 miles or more.

How a flesh-and-blood animal can produce such a violent blast remains a mystery. Actually, almost everything about sperm whale anatomy is mysterious, because it is difficult to map body parts that are far bigger than the anatomist doing the mapping. The head of a big male sperm whale can be 25 feet long and take up a third of the animal's length. Much of a sperm whale's head is occupied by the spermaceti organ, a huge fibrous cask containing a milky, waxy material that was highly prized as a lubricant and lamp oil, and which to Nantucket whalers looked like nothing more than gallons and gallons of semen -- hence the name. "I've never been able to figure out how they rationalized females having spermaceti too," Cranford says.

To modern biologists, a structure as big and as odd as the spermaceti organ cries out for an evolutionary explanation, and marine mammalogists have argued for years over its function. Cranford subscribes to what marine mammalogists call the big bang theory, which argues, among other things, that a sperm whale's head is a gigantic noisemaker. The spermaceti organ, according to this school of thought, helps amplify and focus the whale's sonic emissions, which it uses to stun fast-swimming squid and fish long enough to gobble them up. The big bang theory has been difficult to demonstrate because no one knew the precise arrangement of parts inside a whale's head. "When you cut into the animal you destroy the geometry, and it's the geometry, the shape of tissues, and their consistency that are responsible for the sound beam," Cranford says. He thought if he could find a way to scan a whale's head, he could pin down the geometric relationships between its parts and decipher the purpose of the spermaceti organ.

First, though, there was the small matter of funding. Cranford's adjunct professorship at San Diego State is unpaid unless he teaches or gets a grant through the university, and marine-mammal biology is not exactly a big priority for the National Science Foundation. Some years, Cranford has had to pay for his research out of his own pocket -- or rather that of his wife, who is an invertebrate zoologist for the San Diego water department. The rest of the time, nearly all of his funding has come from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

The Navy has very practical reasons for being interested in dolphin sounds. A blindfolded dolphin can detect an object three inches in diameter from a distance of 123 yards. That's roughly equivalent to standing at one end of a football field and spotting a tangerine in the opposite end zone. More to the point for the Navy, a dolphin is a lot better at such tasks than the sonar dome on a submarine. Trained dolphins can pinpoint underwater mines from a distance of several hundred feet with almost 100 percent accuracy. Even the best submarine sonar domes, backed by a roomful of sophisticated computers that analyze the returning echoes, routinely miss mines. That's not good enough, Cranford says: "It only takes one inexpensive little mine to blow a hole in a great big expensive ship full of sailors."

Five years ago, the federal government gave a group of engineers several million dollars to begin developing an electronic dolphin -- a self-propelled, mine-detecting underwater drone as perceptive as a cetacean. Such a device could be deployed from a ship to scan for mines even in shallow waters. If the drone found any, the ship could hightail it to safer waters without worrying about having to come back and pick up its drone. "We want to have something in a box that can do what the dolphins can do," Bob Gisiner, the marine-mammal science program manager at ONR, told me. "They can find objects buried under the mud. We don't have any sonar that can do that anywhere near as well."

It turned out to be a hellishly difficult problem. Most of the Navy's efforts were focused on signal processing, or detecting the echoes that come back from distant objects and computing where and what the objects are. "Everybody thought signal processing was sexy," Gisiner said. Cranford's research, by contrast, seemed to the engineers like a mere mechanical problem and not worth spending a lot of money on.

The engineers tried using piezoceramic elements, each of which emits only a single frequency or a very narrow band of frequencies. But a dolphin's broadband click required a huge array of elements, and the prototypes failed to produce sounds of the right length, frequency, and duration. "In the end, they couldn't make dolphin noises," Gisiner said. "They just could not do it."

Even so, Gisiner has had to fight to keep Cranford's funding going. Cranford says, "The only reason I've been able to stick with it is I'm really excited about the nuggets of discovery -- that moment of finding something that nobody has found before. It's like being a modern-day explorer. You've got to be a little abnormal to be willing to do absolutely anything to answer a question. Only 1 percent of the world's population has a Ph.D. You are at the tip of the tail of a bell-shaped curve if you are willing to devote yourself to getting a Ph.D. in what amounts to a backwater of science."

Cranford had no yearnings to be a scientist as a child. He grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, the grandson of a dairy farmer who emigrated from Switzerland in 1919. He wears his grandfather's gold ring. Cranford's father was an elevator constructor. "He had to figure out how to maneuver an elevator into a little hole in the skeleton of a building," Cranford says. "I've always wondered if I got my interest in understanding how things work from my dad. He was a mechanical engineer without the training."

When Cranford enrolled in Long Beach Community College after finishing high school, no one in his family had ever gone past 12th grade. One day his zoology instructor told her students to propose a research project. "I wrote down,