Disentangling Whales a Dangerous Job

Thursday July 2, 2009

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk on large whale disentanglement given by David Morin, who works for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and previously worked for the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (PCCS) in Provincetown, MA, an organization which has taken the lead on rescuing entangled whales along the East Coast of the U.S.

Entanglements in fishing gear are one of the major threats to whales. Luckily, there are people out there working to prevent entanglements in the first place, and to rescue those whales that get entangled.

Check out the photos on PCCS's web site, and you'll get an idea of what a dangerous job it is to disentangle whales. Imagine approaching a 40-foot humpback whale, who weighs as much as 500 people, and trying to cut off sometimes hundreds of feet of rope. It's not a job for an amateur!

Entanglements can be life-threatening to a whale. Entanglements may involve lines and/or buoys wrapped around various parts of a whale's body, including its flippers, tail and head. This may impair its ability to move, feed, or breathe. If the gear is there long enough, deformities and infection will result.

In some of the pictures and videos Morin shared with us today, whales were so damaged by gear that I reacted with a mixture of nausea and sadness, thinking about the huge impact we can have on these enormous creatures.

If you're interested in this issue, maybe you want to help out. One way we can all help is by knowing where our seafood comes from, and limiting consumption to fish that is caught in a more eco-friendly manner. There are also several interesting career paths and volunteer opportunities to learn about here, from supporting disentanglement efforts themselves to working on new gear technology that will limit harm to whales and other marine life.