Trained team frees entangled humpback whale

In the photo above by Sean Neilson, NOAA MMHSRP Permit No. 24359, a tight gauge line connects a whale’s mouth to its tail, curving its body into a C shape.

Gustavus, Alaska (KINY) – It took a team of National Park Service staff, NOAA, and whale experts to free an entangled humpback whale near Glacier Bay earlier this month.

Whale biologist with the Glacier Bay National Park in Gustavus, Janet Neilson, said the report first came into the park’s Visitor Information Station from local residents Sesylia Hazen and Kamille Williams on Oct. 10.

“They were actually standing on the dock right there in Gustavus and they they looked out across Icy Strait and they saw pretty close to the dock a whale and it was towing two buoys,” she said. “Every time it dove, it was pulling the buoys under with it.”

She advised the public to use NOAA’s Marine Mammal Stranding hotline at 877-925-7773 if they come across an entangled animal.

“What most folks don’t know is that it actually takes some really specialized tools and a lot of experience to safely disentangle a whale,” Neilson said. “The best thing to do is to report it and get folks like us who have been trained to respond.”

Whales become entangled fairly often, but they are usually able to escape on their own. In this case, human intervention was determined necessary.

Park staff went quickly to the dock with spotting scopes and cameras with powerful lenses to confirm what kind of whale it was and to gather more details on the entanglement.

By early afternoon, two trained disentanglement responders, Bethany Robichaud and wildlife biologist Tania Lewis, were on their way to the scene just outside the park in the NPS patrol vessel Talus, along with ranger Alison Richardson, to better document the whale’s condition.

Since 2005, the Large Whale Entanglement Response network has offered whale disentanglement training in several Alaska communities. The network currently contains approximately 150 active members, including several NPS staff at Glacier Bay.

“It was only able to swim in circles. It couldn’t swim straight and freely, it was really sad to see,” Neilson said. “It had been entangled for several days, we were able to contact the owner of the gear and find out how long it had been lost for. We had a pretty good timeline of how long this animal had been entangled. And that played into our assessment of how life threatening this entanglement was.”

Through their assessment, the entanglement was determined to be life-threatening, and the team planned their next course of action.

The park consulted with NOAA to form a rescue plan for the young juvenile whale, who was entangled in some heavy gauge line and buoys attached to a 300 pound crab pot.

By coincidence, highly skilled whale disentanglement expert, Dr. Fred Sharpe from the Alaska Whale Foundation, had just arrived in Juneau and was available to fly to Gustavus Oct. 11. Sharpe agreed to lead a team on the NPS research vessel Capelin.

Neilson called his help invaluable in freeing the whale.

“We really got lucky in this case. We had a really great, great A team of folks. So many people helped with this entanglement. A small boat was working on the whale,” she said. “There were three of us in that boat, small, inflatable, but then we had a safety boat nearby with more Park Service staff who were all really essential to how this operation played out safely and successfully.”

Neilson’s husband, Sean, is a FAA licensed drone pilot. He was able to gather imagery from above, which she said helped determine their strategy for cutting the whale free.

Part of the safety protocol for the operation is regular consultation with NOAA response coordinators.

Throughout the event, they kept in regular contact with one of the world’s leading whale disentanglement experts, Ed Lyman, Regional Large Whale Entanglement Response Coordinator from the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary in Maui.

He acts as a Regional Large Whale Entanglement Response Coordinator under NOAA’s Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program.

Fortunately, there was cell phone service in the area of the response, making it possible to have conversations and share images throughout the process.

The park keeps stashes of specialized tools on hand that can be used for these types of situations.

The team was able to seize a few critical opportunities to make cuts in the line using a specially designed knife mounted on a very long pole.

“The whole idea is to be close to the whale, but to extend your reach,” Neilson said.

The team worked with the whale all day until daylight was disappearing, using specialized tools to remove more of the gear while remaining at a distance.

Photos taken by Sean’s drone and the Capelin team later confirmed that by the end of the effort, the whale had no line left around its tailstock, and that the loop through its mouth had been cut.

The whale maintained its curved posture after the lines were cut, but biologists expect that it returned to a more normal form once it was able to move freely again.

Last fall, Alaska Whale Foundation / University of Hawaii researcher Martin van Aswegen used a drone to measure the length of this whale at 32.5 ft (9.9 m).

SEAK-5490 is currently estimated to be 3-4 years old based on measurements of other young Alaska humpbacks.

Now, whale SEAK-5490 can be tracked on happywhale.com.

It’s important for whales in Alaska to fill up on fish and krill before migrating.

Thanks to the team effort, SEAK-5490 should be ready to migrate soon—whether they winter in Mexico or Hawaii is yet to be discovered.

This response was authorized under the authority of NOAA Fisheries’ Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program Permit No. 24359.

Note: markings on buoys have been removed from photos for the privacy of their owner(s). The entanglement was not intentional.