The Cascadia Research Collective led a multi-day operation to free an entangled humpback whale approximately 20 miles off the coast of Newport, Oregon. Then, a local fishing boat joined in to help.
An Oregon State University research assistant spotted the whale from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter while surveying the coast for whales and fishing gear three days earlier.
The trained response team included members from the Oregon Coast Aquarium and Oregon State University, with support from Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay.
Responders reached out to local fisherman, Poggy Lapham, to join the effort and help lift the gear with a hydraulic winch on his boat, F/V Michele Ann. That gave responders access to free the whale from the gear. An online photo catalog identified the whale as a young humpback previously sighted in British Columbia in 2024.
“While the team removed all of the gear from the whale, the entanglement left the young whale’s jaw permanently open, leaving it unable to feed and unlikely to survive,” wrote the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
After the rescue, responders collected all the entangling gear from the whale to provide insight into how these incidents occur.
According to NOAA, the assisting fishing vessel recovered a tangle of more than 3,000 feet of line, five sablefish pots, and individual commercial Dungeness crab traps from Oregon and Washington. The condition of the gear indicated that it could be derelict or lost gear, but NOAA Fisheries is following up with gear owners for more details.
The collected gear will undergo further analysis to help researchers understand the mechanics of the entanglement. The Cascadia Research Collective says that analyzing the gear may help develop methods to prevent future entanglements.
“This is truly a heartbreaker because of the whale’s injuries, but we will learn so much from this case that can help us prevent future entanglements,” said Lauren Saez, who helped coordinate the response for NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region. “We disentangled the whale safely, got all the gear back, and had great collaboration with the fishing industry. Additionally, we got whale DNA samples from the gear to help identify which population it belongs to. All this information is crucial to understand what happened and what we can do to help prevent future entanglements.”
Members of the public who see entangled whales are encouraged to report them to 877-767-9425.
To learn more about the rescue team and how you can help entangled whales, click here.
To learn more about this specific incident, click here.
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