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DIThis is utterly heartbreaking, yet a sad reality of what marine life faces every single day. You can hear this unfortunate humpback struggling to breathe. She was one of the lucky ones—and was eventually cut loose.
Entanglement specifically refers to the wrapping of lines, netting, or other materials of anthropogenic origin around the body of an animal. Bycatch refers to the unintentional capture of species such as small cetaceans in fishing nets. Worldwide, both entanglement and bycatch in fisheries operations pose a major risk for 86% of the world’s toothed whales, according to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.
Entanglement is a pressing and longstanding threat to the wellbeing of cetaceans globally.
Entanglement doesn’t only cause injury and distress in whales, and restrict life-sustaining day-to-day activities; whales can also be anchored in place by fishing gear such as crab and prawn traps and aquaculture gear, causing them to drown. Various forms of fishing gear such as gillnets, driftnets, traps, weirs, purse-seine nets, long-lines, trawls and others were implicated with causing entanglement that may lead to suffocation and death of whales, dolphins and porpoises. Globally, over 300,000 small cetaceans die each year due to entanglement in fishing gear 2. Several species are at high risk of extinction due to bycatch, including the vaquita in the Gulf of Mexico and Maui’s dolphins in New Zealand.
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are one of the most commonly entangled species of baleen whale and well known for entanglement in fishing gear around the world. For humpback whales, half of the individuals in some large whale populations are entangled at least once in their life, including 52-78% of humpbacks in southeast Alaska. #commercialfishing #bycatch 🎥 @captain.coleharrison reposted from @racingextinction
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