After failing to rescue an 80-foot blue whale entangled in a fishing net in the Pacific Ocean off California’s coast, officials are making a second attempt to find and free the massive sea creature.
The whale was first spotted Monday by people aboard a boating tour operated by Captain Dave’s Dolphin & Whale Watching Safari, according to a Facebook post from the group. Boat Capt. Tom Southern departed as part of the original rescue mission, which had to be canceled when they couldn’t locate the whale before it got dark.
"As of last night, attempts to disentangle the 80-foot long blue whale were unsuccessful," National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries spokesman Michael Milstein said Tuesday in a statement obtained by CNN. A tracking device was placed on the whale for part of the day, but officials later decided to remove it.
A video posted to the safari’s YouTube channel showed the giant mammal surfacing and diving below the water. It appeared to be dragging about 200 feet of line and several buoys from its tail.
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During their first attempt, rescuers had made at least six tries to cut the lines attached to the pot hanging below the whale and dragging its tail down, the Orange County Register reports. At one point, the team managed to get within 20 feet of the whale’s tail and a rescuer got a knife against the line, but was unable to cut through it.
“We'll ask all boaters on the water to look for it," Capt. Dave Anderson, the operator of the safari, told the Register. "We don't know where it will end up. It will not survive with all the gear on it. We have to get it off."
He added that it appears the whale went through the line, which could be wrapped around its mouth or pectoral flippers. NOAA officials were able to determine, thanks to imprinted identification numbers, the crab traps and lines snaring the whale came from a legal crab trap business.
"NOAA has seen more entanglements in the last few years perhaps because the waters off the west coast have been warmer than usual," Milstein told CNN. "They've seen species in places they've never encountered but have no real evidence for what is causing this."
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It’s unusual for blue whales to become tangled in fishing nets because they usually stay far offshore, Milstein told KTLA.com. Typically they’re able to break free from ropes and nets because of their size and power. This is the second reported incident of a blue whale entanglement off the West Coast in two years.
It is also the first attempted rescue of an entangled whale, according to the Register. Last fall, another blue whale was reported as entangled in fishing gear, but officials were unable to locate it.
Just last year, NOAA reported 61 whales as entangled off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California – the highest annual total since the organization began keeping records in 1982. Eleven of the reports were due to gear from Dungeness crab commercial fisheries.
The blue whale is the largest animal to ever live on Earth, according to NOAA. The primary threats they face are vessel strikes, pollution, fisheries interactions and long-term climate change.
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