Efforts to Untangle Right Whale Fails
April 7 -- Somewhere off the Northeast coast, a 10-ton mammal known as Kingfisher is swimming against time.
Researchers say a mess of fishing lines and buoys wrapped 20 to 30 times around the juvenile northern right whale's fins and tail are likely to dig into its skin as he grows. The cuts could then become infected and lead to a slow, painful death.
Entangled whales are a human-made problem — more than half of the known deaths of the endangered northern right whale each year are due to entanglement with lines that are dragged by fishing boats or by a collision with the boats themselves. But human efforts to save right whales from entanglement remain spotty and expensive.
When crews of experts tried to free Kingfisher this spring, rough seas prevented them staying close to the whale long enough to cut the lines free. They did manage to attach a radio buoy that tracked the yearling for 15 days and 840 miles as it swam north. But when Kingfisher swam under a fishing boat last Sunday, the buoy, which was attached to the lines on the animal, snapped off and ended up in the boat.
"Without any means of systematically finding this whale, every aspect of planning for another disentanglement attempt on Kingfisher has now changed," researchers reported from the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass.
Unfortunately, the failed efforts to save Kingfisher are common when it comes to disentangling northern right whales.
In 1991, researchers spent more than $250,000 trying to rescue a northern right whale tangled in rope, but couldn't save it. Despite massive rescue efforts to rescue a right whale in 1999, the animal died as the polypropylene line that was wrapped around both flippers and around the body gradually burned through its skin, blubber and muscle. In 2001, multiple attempts to save a 50-ton right whale named Churchill cost more than $250,000 and didn't work.
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