A multi-state team recently freed a whale entangled in more than 4,000 pounds of fishing gear as it swam through New York’s Ambrose Channel.
The four-day rescue effort began when recreational boater spotted the distressed animal off the coast of the Rockaways in New York City and reported it to the Coast Guard. Experts from New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey came together to free the whale.
First on the scene, rescue workers from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society surveyed the whale. They discovered something was anchoring it to the seafloor, preventing it from swimming and making it difficult for the whale to hold its head above water to breathe.
Surveyors returned to the whale the following day and discovered what was weighing it down — over 4,000 pounds of steel fishing gear and several buoys. The team took photographs to document the entanglement, which left the whale in immediate danger of being attacked by a predator or hit by a ship passing through the channel.
The New York team called on disentanglement experts from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for help. The next day, the Center’s experts used an inflatable boat to approach the whale and start cutting away the debris.
By nightfall, the team had detached multiple buoys and cut through some of the gear that was tangled around the whale’s fluke. It would take another day of work to fully free the ocean giant.
“That was among the more challenging whale disentanglement cases we have dealt with,” Scott Landry, director of Marine Animal Entanglement Response at the Center, said in a statement. “That whale was fighting to live. All the folks we were working with on the water the last two days were fighting to help it.”
On the fourth day of the rescue, a research vessel from New Jersey’s Monmouth University and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Drift Collection Vessel were deployed to aid the effort, along with the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Sandy Hook lab.
The team used hacksaws and other heavy-duty equipment to make the final cuts to a steel cable trapping the whale and remove the debris from the ocean.
By 4 p.m., the team watched as the whale swam free with few visible severe injuries, namely cuts along its body and a few deeper lacerations at its tail.
“Without intervention, that whale would not have survived,” Landry says. “While it’s not entirely out of the woods yet, its prospects are now 100% better than what they were. We are optimistic we will see the whale again and, like the majority of humpback whales off our coast, it will bear the scars of entanglement.”
The whale was spotted off the coast of Long Island in early August about a week after the rescue. He appeared to be doing just fine.
Source: Sport Diver
