Endangered right whale spotted entangled in fishing line off the Outer Banks
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is monitoring an endangered right whale spotted off the Outer Banks snarled in fishing line and most likely fatally injured.
An aerial survey team from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium sighted the “heavily entangled” juvenile female Sunday about 20 miles east of Rodanthe, NOAA said in a news release.
“There were several wraps of line around the mouth and tail, with additional line trailing behind the whale,” the release said.
The rare sighting is the second in the same day off Hatteras Island. A 1-year-old male was captured on video swimming near Avon Pier earlier in the day, the Island Free Press reported. Before Sunday, right whales hadn’t been spotted off the Outer Banks coast for at least five years, the paper wrote.
Biologists reviewed the aerial images and found the whale “to have numerous wounds across her body and whale lice on her head,” the release said. When whales are sick or injured and swimming slows, parasitic whale lice proliferate.
It was too late in the day and the whale was too far from shore for NOAA to launch a response team, but officials are working to sight her again “and determine if an entanglement response will be possible,” the release said.
NOAA Fisheries biologists have deemed the case a serious injury, with the whale likely not to survive.
The juvenile female is documented on the New England Aquarium’s North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog, which tracks sightings of each remaining whale. She is the daughter of a whale named Spindle who was recently spotted off the coast of Georgia with a new calf, NOAA said.
Before she was photographed off Hatteras Island, the whale was last seen in May in Massachusetts Bay and wasn’t entangled at the time.
Since 2017, NOAA has documented 94 sick, dead or seriously injured right whales, prompting the agency to declare an “unusual mortality event.”
The right whale has been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1970, with only about 350 remaining today, according to NOAA. Deaths among right whales are outpacing births, with now fewer than 70 reproductively active females remaining, NOAA said.
Right whales can weigh up to 140,000 pounds and grow more than 50 feet. They migrate in the fall from feeding grounds in New England to South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida, according to NOAA.
Kari Pugh, kari.pugh@virginiamedia.com
