Rescuers respond to 2 entangled whales
By Mary Ann Bragg
Posted Aug 1, 2018
PROVINCETOWN — Rescuers had their hands full Monday in two attempts to free entangled whales in U.S. and Canadian waters.
“It was an incredibly difficult entanglement,” said Center for Coastal Studies marine animal disentanglement director Scott Landry of a late-afternoon attempt to free a large, well-known female humpback in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary after she appeared to bite down on an anchor line and then panicked.
Landry and other rescuers were in the area doing research and able to go to the whale, named Cardhu, and partially free her. But he and the other rescuers remain concerned that she still needs help, he said. While Cardhu likely has left Stellwagen Bank temporarily as a response to the experience, Landry said the center is asking everyone on the water to keep an eye out for her, as she is likely to return in time.
Landry said this entanglement was rare in that others on the water on Monday witnessed it.
“Cardhu remains entangled,” Hyannis Whale Watcher Cruises wrote Monday evening on Facebook. “She remains with a twisted line in her mouth. We (the whale watching community) will all keep a lookout for her and hope she remains in our area, can be sighted, and can be freed completely from this tangle of line.”
As of 2016, humpback whales were no longer listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, but that same year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an unusual mortality event for the species from Maine to Florida, and humpback deaths continue to remain elevated. There are an estimated 10,400 to 10,752 humpback whales in the northern Atlantic Ocean, including U.S. waters, according to NOAA.
“Thank you again for your patience,” wrote the whale watch company, which docks in Barnstable Harbor. “It was overwhelming and heartbreaking to witness, but we are glad we saw it and could get her some immediate response. We will look for her, I promise.”
First seen off Cape Cod Bay in 1981, Cardhu was pregnant then with the first of eight known calves. “She seems to be fond of the Stellwagen Bank feeding grounds and can be seen here at any time during the season,” according to online sanctuary records.
Even farther north on Monday, an entangled North Atlantic right whale was reported 22 miles east of Grand Manan, New Brunswick, near the Bay of Fundy. At that time, vessel problems and poor weather stopped a rescue response, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. On Tuesday, a thorough search of the area by several agencies came up empty, and the search was called off due to more bad weather. With other agencies, the Canadian government will monitor the waters by plane and boat, weather permitting, in an attempt to find the entangled right whale and assess its condition, the agency wrote in an email.
The critically endangered right whales migrate each year along the Atlantic coast, including stops in Cape Cod Bay, as they follow the movement and density of food sources such as zooplankton, according to scientists.
On July 13, another entangled right whale was spotted swimming in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, off Miscou, New Brunswick, with rope around its body and trailing behind it, but surveyors lost sight of the animal by the next day.
With new measures in place this year to limit ship strikes and fishing rope entanglements, the Canadian agency has reported no right whale deaths. After the death of 12 right whales last year in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and another five in waters near Cape Cod, scientists have spoken of a possibly dire decline in the population, which didn’t produce a single documented calf in the most recent birthing season.
As of Saturday, 25 commercial fishing areas in Canadian waters were fully or partially closed on a temporary basis because of sightings of right whales.
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