An Encounter with an Entangled Humpback – 4/9/24

Judith

I was working on our whale watch boat in Holmavik, I work for Laki tours in Iceland. We have two different places we whale watch. One of them is Steingrímsfjörður peninsula, but the other is Holmavik, which is mostly humpbacks up in the West Fjords, and it’s a fairly remote place, and we’re the only whale watch boat, and it’s a bit off the beaten track, and we were just out on what was a regular tour with quite a few humpbacks around, and at that time of year, they’re usually doing a little bit of long lining in the fjord. But I have to say, Iceland doesn’t have a huge amount of fixed fishing gear. And whale entanglement there seems fairly rare compared to many other places, like New England and other places I’ve worked.

But anyway, we were following a whale. We were following a few whales, and there was one whale that started acting strangely, very, very close to where we could see a buoy in the water, and the whale was actually starting to act very strangely, but I didn’t really know what was going on. We were just kind of watching and but the buoy stayed there. So I thought, Oh, well, maybe the whale’s just a bit weird. But then after a couple of minutes, we actually saw the buoy disappear, and obviously the whale brought the buoy underwater. And then, of course, I realized that it had just gotten entangled. And I was, yeah, I’m absolutely amazed, because there’s so little fixed fishing gear there. It’s not something I’ve ever seen, even a whale entangled in Iceland before, let alone actually watched it happen. And I didn’t get very good pictures, but I snapped a couple, and luckily, they were good enough to see that this was a humpback, a young humpback that we’ve been seeing there quite a lot, and it has a really distinctive mark on its tail that looks like a seagull. So, we had started calling it Bird. (also known as Maria, HRC-MN1073).

Photo by Judith Scott

But anyway, we waited for a bit. Didn’t see the whale again. I was a bit worried that having a whale watch boat there would stress it out even more than it was already stressed out. So, we finished the tour, and for about half an hour or something, after it happened, the whales were behaving really strangely. So, I wondered if Bird was making crazy sounds underwater that the other whales were picking up, because they all started diving strangely. And then as soon as we got back to the dock, I contacted WhaleWise, who are a non profit that are doing research in my whale watching area.

Photo by Judith Scott

Petr

I am Petr. I’m a marine scientist and Research Officer at WhaleWise. And yeah, we were having this really extra unique event on this on this, autumn day, in Iceland. When we heard the call from Judith about this entangled whale, we were very concerned. And basically, we hopped into the action and try to put together a plan of what we could do.

Flo

I’m Flo. I’m a research and engagement officer with WhaleWise. I’ve been with WhaleWise, I think, five or six years now doing research in Iceland, but yeah, so this day was a really crazy day for us, because we’ve never actually seen an actively entangled whale before. Because our work, the Scars From Above project is looking at the scarring that’s left behind by the entanglements that these whales experience. And so we’ve seen evidence of entanglement. We’ve never actually witnessed it firsthand, so it was a really crazy day for us. But yeah, so I guess the first we knew about it, like Petr said, we got a call from Judith, and that was we were really concerned for Bird but we weren’t actually in Steingrímsfjörður that day, we were about an hour and a half away. So, we decided to immediately head back to Steingrímsfjörður to see if we could help at all. And then, I think, a few hours later, we actually got a message from our neighbor in Steingrímsfjörður, who’s a fisherman, and he sent us a video and he said, Oh, I’ve seen the whale. It’s near the harbor. So, in the video, you could see the whale, you could see that it was breathing, but it was just kind of floating at the surface, not being very active at all. And you could see the buoy was floating a little ways away from it, but still near it. And so that was really important information for us, because that gave us information about where the whale was and what was going on with it. So that was really important. So then at that point, we tried contacting different people at the government in Iceland to try to get a rescue set up. And so we started contacting them, and we got in touch with someone from the, I can’t quite remember what that organ that branch is called,

Judith

MAST, they’re the veterinary kind of association or something, aren’t they?

Flo

Yeah. So we got in contact with someone there, and they had gotten information from a few witnesses that the whale had actually died. So that came as a shock to us, because we had just gotten a video of this whale clearly breathing, so that was really shocking, and so we were really concerned, what if this whale has died, but then we weren’t really sure if those accounts were true, because it’s hard to tell if a whale is alive or dead, if you don’t know a lot about whales. So, we still had hope that Bird was still alive. So, then we headed back towards Steingrímsfjörður together, and we were hoping that we would find Bird there, relatively close to land, and that we could observe it.

Petr

So we knew more or less the location where the whale was spotted the last time, thanks to our fisherman friend who took the video. So we arrived to that particular location, and obviously we then started the usual everyday stuff for us, and that is searching for the whales. But this time, obviously we knew that this particular whale, Bird must have probably spent lots of time at the surface, hence, the blows would not necessarily be very visible, which is obviously quite difficult if you’re searching for whales that are not really having visible blows. Luckily, at the same time, from the video, we knew that having this whale been entangled. It has the two buoys attached to it in some sort of way. And these buoys luckily are colorful, right? So instead of searching for the whale itself, we were actually searching for the for the red and yellow buoys that were close by it that way, we were actually quite successful at as at finding the whale quite soon after we arrived to the location, and then basically put together a plan of trying to drone the whale as soon as possible in the least sort of stressful way, i.e. Flo actually was the first person who would fly. And then I also flew over. We did two flights together, basically to obtain a little bit more information about the entanglement, where the whale was entangled, how much, and potentially the other raw injuries of the animal. And obviously, as I said, we tried to do it in the best way possible, to not stress the animal that was already in sure stress for a very long time, plus five hours at least. So, what we really tried is to keep the drone very far away from the animal. We used basically just our zoom lens on the drone, rather than descending close to the whale. And also we would keep our drone horizontally away from the animal, to again, minimize any noise impact on the individual

Flo

So we did a couple flights and we could obviously see that this whale was indeed alive, which was really important, because, like, according to our contact with the government, they had assumed that it was correct that it had died. So, we wanted to definitely call them immediately, once we found Bird, to tell them it is, in fact, alive, and we really want to organize rescue, so that was really important for us to let them know. So yeah, so we did a couple flights, and on the first flight, we could see that there was indeed a rope wrapped around the tail stock so where the body of the whale attaches to the fluke. And there was just one rope there, but you could see there were some red grooves in its tail stock. So clearly it had been entangled for a while, which we knew, and that had left some scars and some raw flesh, which was really unfortunate to see, but it was really lucky that this is a relatively minor entanglement, no entanglement is good, but it wasn’t wrapped around its whole body or like restricting it its pack fins or anything. So that was good to know, and we could let the authorities know that it was just one line wrapped around the tail stock, which is really important. And then on the second flight, we actually found some scarring on its, sort of its face and across its back. So clearly this line had moved throughout the day from its head back towards its fluke, which is often where a rope will get caught around a humpback. So that was really important information. We relayed that, and then we just continued to watch Bird. So, we just made sure that it kept breathing and it wasn’t moving too much. If any behavior changes were going to happen, we wanted to be there to, like, relay that information.

Photo: Bird © Flordespina Dodds/WhaleWise

So, we watched it for a while, and then we saw some boats coming up towards the whale. And at first, we were a bit concerned, because they were some fishing boats, and we hoped that they wouldn’t distress the whale, but actually it was really, really nice that actually, our contact with the government, using our information, were able to send out a rescue boat. And these people, this rescue boat was a SARS boat, so in Iceland, they are the people who would rescue you if you had an accident at sea. And so they’re not necessarily trained for whale disentanglement, but they are trained for other human rescues.

So they were able to come out, and they really, really carefully maneuvered around the whale, and with the help of three other fishing boats, they were able to assess the situation. They picked up the buoy a couple times to hope to loosen it from the whale, and they spent about, I think, 20 minutes really carefully maneuvering. And finally they got a stick with a hook out so they could lift up the rope, and Bird managed to wiggle out of it, and then we could see Bird. It was really, really nice. We could see the whale fluke down, lifting its tail, which we hadn’t seen it do. That was really, really nice, and a nice confirmation that the rope had been removed.

And then it was amazing that you could hear even from land, we were like a kilometer away on land watching this, but you could hear the like cheers on the boats, which is so nice, because you could tell everyone, including the fishermen, who often are villainized because they’re the ones leaving the using long lines to fish and different things. So, it was really nice to see how much they cared about helping this whale and how involved they got. So, yeah, it was really, really amazing.

Lindsay

That’s fantastic. I’m glad that it was able to be a mostly positive story, and everybody was able to come together and help disentangle this whale. Have you seen Bird again Judith?

Judith

No, sadly, sadly, not, I think the WhaleWise team kind of watched it swim as fast as it could out of the fjord. And no, sadly, on the remaining tours of the season, we never saw it again. I mean, it might not want to come back there, but that’s one lucky whale, considering how, I mean, it was five hours, seems a long time. I’m sure it was a long time for the poor whale. But of course, we know that when whales become entangled, they don’t die within five hours. It usually takes them weeks, or, months to die. So that’s why they were like, I’m sure this whale is not dead after five hours and but, yeah, it’s such a cool story, because that was one lucky whale. We’re only one whale watch boat, so the fact that we saw it happen, when it happened, and these guys were around to come and help, and then they got it out without the proper disentangling equipment. Yeah. We were all very, very happy, yeah.

This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 74 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.


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