How wildlife officials saved a humpback whale found 'hogtied' to a 300-pound crab pot

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
...""In a sense, the whale was hogtied"
When park staff were able to assess the situation from a boat, they found a heavy fishing line winding from the whale's mouth to its tail, ending in a glob of tangled lines at its tail.

"In a sense, the whale was hogtied," said Janet Neilson, a whale biologist with the NPS.

"It was curved into a C-shaped posture. The line was so tight that it couldn't swim in a straight line," she told NPR.

Neilson and her colleagues called the owners of the crabbing gear, who confirmed that a 300-pound crab pot had gone missing, along with 450 feet of heavy line. The whale had likely been entangled for about three days.

In general, humpback whales get entangled more often than people realize, Neilson said.

"Usually they can get out of the gear pretty quickly on their own, just by breaching and shaking loose with energetic behaviors."

But the longer time passes, the more likely the whale is to panic, rolling and twisting until those entanglements become messier and increasingly life threatening.

In those cases when human intervention could save a whale's life, one agency authorizes a rescue operation: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program."...