[ad_1]
Off the coast of Australia, a massive ocean creature pulled fishing gear behind its body.
Ant Rozetsky via Unsplash
One of the largest migrations of the fall is underway in the Pacific as one of the ocean’s giants heads to colder water for the southern hemisphere’s summer.
Over the course of a few months, around 40,000 humpback whales will swim down the eastern coast of Australia on their way to Antarctica, traveling more than 3,000 miles.
The annual migration is the perfect time to see the majestic whales, sometimes close to shore, but it also means the whales are navigating waters that have become filled with human products.
On Sept. 28, reports were made to the Large Whale Disentanglement Team of a whale appearing to be dragging fishing gear off Sydney’s Northern Beaches, according to an Oct. 2 Facebook Reel from the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service.
When the team caught up to the animal, it had more than 160 feet of green rope and white buoys attached at the whale’s mouth and stretching far behind it, officials said.
“The entanglement involved the whale’s mouth, posing a serious risk to its movement and health,” officials said.
Instead of immediately approaching the whale and trying to cut the line out, however, the rescue team tried another approach.
They tied more buoys on.
“We attached a tracker and additional floats to the trailing gear, enabling us to track and slow down the whale for a safe approach,” officials said. “As the day progressed, the swell increased, preventing the team from making a safe approach to cut away the ropes. By late afternoon, the team disengaged just south of Botany Bay leaving the tracker in place to pick up the pursuit in the morning.”
The buoys did the work for them.
As time went on and the additional weight of the buoys and tracker pulled on the fishing line, it pulled the line loose from the whale’s mouth, allowing the animal to slip out of its entanglement.
When the team returned to the site of the tracker Monday morning, there was no whale in sight.
Officials said the entanglements are “unfortunately not unexpected” as so many whales pass through the region.
More than 300,000 whales and dolphins are believed to die each year from becoming trapped in fishing gear or caught up in bycatch, meaning they are pulled to the surface in large nets but they are not the intended target, according to the International Whaling Commission.
“It can lead to drowning as trapped animals cannot reach the surface to breathe, to laceration and infection as heavy ropes bite through skin, and to starvation as animals towing heavy fishing gear cannot feed effectively,” the organization said.
Humpback whales were once hunted nearly to extinction, but a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1985 allowed the species to make a comeback, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Humpback whales can reach up to 60 feet long, weigh as much as 40 tons and have a similar lifespan to humans, reaching between 80 and 90 years old, NOAA says.
The whale was rescued off Sydney, on Australia’s southeastern coast.
[ad_2]
Irene Wright
Source link
