Ocean Sentry
(From kodiakdailymirror.com)- Four disentanglement experts freed a humpback whale tangled in a fishing line Wednesday in Uyak Bay. Aerial photographs taken by a biologist and pilot for the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge revealed the entanglement Monday. Whale biologists Bree Witteveen and Kate Wynne of the University of Fairbanks Fishery Industrial Technology Center joined Mark Witteveen of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and Amanda Crook, a National Marine Fisheries Service enforcement officer, in the rescue operation.
“It’s a multi-agency disentanglement crew,” Bree Witteveen said. “We’ve all been trained by (NMFS) to do disentanglements.”
Witteveen said the crew departed Kodiak at 9:30 a.m. and located the whale at about 11:15 a.m.
“The whale was able to breathe,” she said. “If not, he wouldn’t have been alive.”
She said the taughtness of the line was an indication it was attached to a crab pot. After cutting that line, the rescuers discovered that the whale was still immobile because the line was still wrapped at least eight times around the whale’s tail.
“One of the wraps was going around his tail stock and along his body to the opposite of the pectoral fin,” Witteveen said. “Basically he was hog tied. He had no propulsion, because he was tied to himself, essentially. I would imagine that maybe nine times out of 10, they’re able to get out of these situations. But they turn left instead of right, and they get themselves into more trouble.”
The crew cut the line alongside the whale’s body, and it was free.
“It took him a little while to regain his senses and feeling, and then he was cruising,” she said.
The operation took about 90 minutes to complete.
The crew attempted to follow and monitor the whale but lost sight of it after about 10 minutes. Witteveen described this as a good sign.
“He took off way too fast, and he was long gone,” she said. “He resumed his normal dive pattern, and we were not able to keep up with him. We felt very good about it. The whole day went very well. Seeing his breathing pattern before we lost him, it looked very normal, like a normal humpback would be surfacing.”
(By ERIK WANDER)
