Careful planning and skill went into saving one of the world’s most dangerous species this week.
According to IBT, a group of biologists in Jacksonville, Fla. helped free a 4-year old endangered whale that had close to 300 feet of fishing rope caught in it’s mouth.
Biologists from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission responded to the call. They weren’t able to pull the entire line out of the whale’s mouth, but gave the whale a “fighting chance.”
“We feel like what we did gives the whale a fighting chance to shed the remainder of the rope on its own,” Clay Georgia, a marine mammal biologist for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, told AP. “The real take-home message here is, we can’t just go out and save and fix every whale that shows up entangled. In some cases it’s just completely impossible to disentangle that whale.”
The Northern Right whales are one of the world’s biggest endangered species. With only 450 left in the wild, the whales migrate towards the warmer coasts of Georgia and Florida to give birth the their calves. Unfortunately, the area is high with commercial fishing gear, which poses a threat to their kind.
Rescuers won’t know if the whale freed itself until he is seen again but are very sure that the whale known as #4057 will survive.
SOURCE: IBT Times | VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube
