Ocean debris again in spotlight as entangled baby whale struggles off California
LOS ANGELES
The plight of an entangled baby whale off Orange County, California, has sparked an urgent multi-agency rescue effort, highlighting again the perils that ocean debris poses to marine mammals and other wildlife.
The baby gray whale has a rope around its mouth and trailing in the water behind it. That’s prompted a team of ocean animal experts from Dana Point to Monterey to closely follow the whale, hoping to get close enough to extricate it.
As the calf grows, the rope could tighten around it, potentially tearing off skin or breaking limbs.
The consequences could be deadly.
“Unfortunately, with most of these entanglements, if the whale can’t get it off and we can’t get it off,” said Justin Viezbicke, California Stranding Network coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, “they ultimately lead up to death.”
Hugging the California coast, the calf and mother are making the arduous annual migration to forage off Alaska. They left behind their winter home in
Mexico, where Viezbicke said the mother probably spent a busy season breeding and calving, to swim 24 hours a day on a dwindling supply of energy. A bastion of killer whales looms ahead in Monterey, he added.
A photographer who volunteers at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach spotted the mother-child pair Monday while aboard a Captain Dave’s Dolphin Safari tour near Dana Point Harbor, said Krysta Higuchi, PMMC spokesperson. A team of PMMC and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration workers quickly loaded onto a boat to rescue the entangled whale.
Each year, according to NOAA, billions of pounds of trash enter the ocean, and nets, ropes and other gear from boats add to the debris.
In the current rescue, Viezbicke said, the goal is to save the whale but also learn how to prevent another entanglement. NOAA reported 17 whale entanglements along the West Coast last year.
“The entanglement response team is really a Band-Aid,” Viezbicke said. “We want to be more preventative in nature than reactive.”
But when the boat approached the pair, Viezbicke said, the mother whale went into protective mode — pushing the calf toward shore while positioning herself between it and the boat, hiding her child beneath her and flipping underwater to evade the rescue team.
“Just like any protective parent, the last thing you want is a boat zooming around the water and pinning your child down,” Viezbicke said, adding that the calf is probably less than a year old. “This is clearly not this mom’s first rodeo.”
After nearly five hours, the mother whale was so agitated, he said, the team decided to go home.
“That adds a whole other dynamic to this where it’s really about human safety,” Viezbicke said. “All it takes is one swing of that tail and we’re done. It makes it super dangerous.”
On Tuesday, whale watcher Phil Kreis took his drone to Point Dume in Malibu to see the sights. He filmed the calf gliding through seafoam-green water, the rope dangling from its mouth. It was only the second time Kreis had ever captured footage of a calf, so he was euphoric.
“It’s kind of like a video game. When it comes in, it’s exhilarating,” Kreis said. “It’s awesome. I love it when the whales come in.”