Featured Image Credit Storyful/Facebook/New Zealand Police
By: Sarah Sharkey
A young humpback whale off the coast of New Zealand was recently in an entanglement predicament. Usually, when a whale gets tangled up with fishing gear or other debris, the story ends very badly for the whale. Luckily for this whale, a team of trained professionals was called the scene.
Specifically, a crew responded to the incident off Cape Solander. Peter Bergman, a spokesman with NPWS, had this to say about the rescue. “Once the whale was disentangled, the team collected the rope and continued to monitor the whale to ensure there were not any additional entanglements. Conditions were very favorable today, with a calm sea and the whale appearing during the middle of the day when we had sufficient daylight to complete this dangerous disentanglement operation.”
The team rescue team consisted of people from Roads and Maritime Services, Port Authority NSW, NSW Police, the Department of Primary Industries, Marine Rescue NSW and the Organization for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans in Australia. The group effort really paid off for this whale!
Other whales are not always so lucky. Many whales and other marine animals are negatively affected or even killed by trash and human debris every single day. The sad reality is that whales will not always be rescued by human helpers. It is important that we continue to make an effort to clean up our oceans.