The first time she saw it, she wasn't even sure what she was seeing. When she understood it was a humpback whale swimming without a tail, she still couldn't believe it.
"It looks so odd, your brain can't even process it and make sense of it at first," said Jessica Farrer, research director for the Whale Museum of Friday Harbor, who saw the whale last week off the south east side of Lopez Island, and monitored it from a distance for several hours until it turned toward Whidbey Island.
"Everyone knows what a humpback whale tail looks like; it is one of the most photographed, iconic marine mammal images in the world. To see this ... it hits hard."
While it's hard to know, the humpback probably lost its tail when it was entangled, probably in fishing gear, said Justin Viezbicke, California marine mammal stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, based in Long Beach. This whale was alone, typical for this species in this area. Much larger groups are sighted farther out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
In his job, he has seen it all, Viezbicke said: whales without tails, even tails without whales. Amputations are not unusual when a whale becomes wrapped in a rope. The blood supply is cut off, and the flipper, or fluke entangled eventually dies and drops off.
While shocking, such entanglements are not unusual — and are a growing risk as climate warming detonates marine heat waves that push whales into conflict with fishers.
Humpbacks, with their large front flippers, do better than most other entangled marine mammals at first, because they can still power through the water even without a tail. But they can't swim or dive or feed normally — and these are animals that in the North Pacific undertake among the longest of migrations of any mammal, swimming thousands of miles from their summer feeding grounds in Alaska to their winter breeding and calving areas as far south as Central America. "That is a long way to swim without a tail," Viezbicke said.
Humpbacks are the most often entangled whale
The number of whales that become entangled in lines, ropes and other debris in the ocean is probably larger than the number of reported cases. Whale populations have increased in recent decades, and reporting of entanglements has improved.
Source: NOAA (Reporting by Lynda V. Mapes, chart by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
Humpbacks are the whales most often entangled on the West Coast, according to NOAA statistics.
Climate change plays a role in these terrible injuries: a marine heat wave called "The Blob" beginning in late 2013 caused whales to feed closer to shore just as toxic algae blooms booming in warm water forced the crab fishery to start later, overlapping with the spring migration of the great whales off the coast.
The humpbacks were victims of habitat compression: they were hunting anchovies the heat wave had squeezed into a narrow band left of suitable water temperatures — which is right where crabbers put their traps. And the crabbers put out even more traps than usual to make up for lost fishing days. Record numbers of whales were entangled in 2015 and 2016.
The number of entanglements has never come back down to where they were before the Blob — but that could be both because of better counting and more whales. Humpback numbers have been increasing since passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 that ending hunting of whales in U.S. waters.
With more humpbacks out in the Salish Sea, the risks of ship strike or entanglement in ever busier water are borne by animals like the humpback seen last week. "It was swimming, it was making it work, what else do you do," Farrer said. "But I can't imagine it is long for this world.
"It makes you sad to be a human. I don't even know what to say, it seems surreal, that whale, I can't even believe it is still alive and swimming."
On the way back from seeing the whale, the crew encountered a crab pot left tethered to a buoy in more than 300 feet of water, not fishing, just abandoned — exactly the sort of situation that could lead to such an accidental injury.
"They should put the image of this whale on a crab license. Tell people this is what your crab pot could do, so anchor it. Put out enough line so it does not float off on a high tide." People have to be vigilant, too, when on the water, she stressed. "If you see debris, pick it up. If it's on a beach, pick it up, because it might not stay there."
The photo of the struggling humpback was all too familiar to Michael Moore, emeritus faculty at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and author of "We are All Whalers the Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (Chicago, 2021) who noted it can take six months for a whale to die by entanglement, from bleeding, wounds and starvation.
"That whale is definitely an emblem, a totem for the crisis," he said of the humpback. "The whales are swimming through a forest of rope. The whales are where the fishermen are, because those are the productive places."
Consumers hold the key to change, he said, in demanding that shippers travel slower and outside of known whale migration routes, and sustainable fisheries, conducted with rope-less gear. And, most of all, in caring about more than the human world.
"We need to extend our social network beyond humans to support the growth and sustenance of nature because humans need that as a species," he said. "We cannot do without nature ... and it is also the right thing to do."
Any marine mammal stranding or entanglement should be called in as soon as possible to give rescuers a chance to help. Call the Entanglement Response Hotline at 877-767-9425 or NOAA's West Coast Marine Stranding Network 866-767-6114.
"If we get a call quickly, we have a good opportunity to do as much as we can, said Doug Sandilands, of the Cascadia Research Collective Partnership for Whale Entanglement Action, which is working to respond to and work to prevent entanglements.
The prospects for this whale are not good, Sandilands said. "Exactly what it is going through, I cannot say, but I know it is not good. This particular whale, I don't know what we could do; I haven't heard of anyone able to help a whale in this condition." The best thing is to give it space, he said. "Prevention is the ultimate goal."
Such an injury is heartbreaking but not surprising, he added. Many more whales are surely entangled and die than are ever seen or reported. "We are only getting about 10%," he said. "A lot go unseen."
Alanna Frayne, director of the Whale Museum's Soundwatch program, was out on the water Wednesday last week when she heard about the whale on the radio. The crew motored to the area off Lopez Island to monitor the scene at a distance, keeping people away. "It is very heartbreaking, to see an animal like that persevering," Frayne said. "The ability to move, to forage, everything is impaired."
When she saw the whale, it was sculling, using its long pectoral fins, basically flying underwater, and still exhibiting its diving behavior, going down, and then lifting up just its stump from the water.
"I've never seen anything like that, and hope never to see anything like it again. I hope we can work toward that.
"I wonder what is next for that whale. It is persevering, but who can say for how long."
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