Entangled humpback whale calf freed from rope near Chatham. Here's how they did it.

EDITOR NOTE: A spelling correction was made on June 17, 2022, in a headline.

PROVINCETOWN — In waters east of Chatham on Tuesday, a humpback whale calf was disentangled from rope by a response team from the Center for Coastal Studies.

On Tuesday morning, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy staff observed a small humpback whale swimming with black rope caught in its mouth and around its tail. Conservancy staff notified the Marine Animal Entanglement Response team at the Center for Coastal Studies, who responded to the scene in Chatham immediately from where they were conducting a research cruise on Stellwagen Bank.

"What we found was actually that it was a calf. So this animal would be somewhere like three, four months old, and likely born down in the Caribbean," said Scott Landry, director of marine animal entanglement response for coastal studies. The calf was young enough to still be dependent on its mother, who was feeding with other whales nearby.

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Landry said it's often difficult to disentangle either a mother or calf because they are generally physically close together and coordinating movements.

"In this case, we had pretty good luck in the sense that mom was extremely busy feeding," Landry said. "Oftentimes, the calves just hang around and wait for the mom to finish doing what she's doing. And that was a good moment for us to make an approach to remove its entanglement."

The team approached the entangled calf in a vessel so as to not provoke the calf or the mother, though Landry said whales in general don't know that anyone is there to help them during these disentanglement situations. This whale was also free swimming — while it was entangled in rope, it was still able to swim and travel miles in any direction.

Wounds indicate the calf had been entangled for weeks

"In most cases, what they're going to see is a boat approaching them, which makes them uncomfortable, and they will try their best to avoid us," Landry said, adding that a calf with little experience with vessels, and without its mother by its side, might not have that avoidant response.

"Essentially, the calf had no idea what to be afraid of. And so the calf wasn't evasive or wasn't shy of us by any means. But also did not make any attempt to approach us," Landry said.

Once close enough to the whale to observe its specific injuries, Landry said the team could see that the calf had been injured for a while.

"There were a lot of active injuries, open wounds, but also some of those wounds had begun to heal. And so what that sort of tells us is that this calf had been entangled for not days, but weeks," Landry said.

With a long pole and hook-shaped knife, the team made a number of cuts to the entanglement. Once the calf dove into the water and the rope floated to the surface, the team retrieved the rope.

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Whale entanglements are 'pretty frequent'

Landry said that these entanglements are "pretty frequent," considering the population of humpbacks is larger than other whales, such as right whales, in this area. There are two populations of humpback whales which feed in the North Atlantic in spring, summer and fall, ranging from the Gulf of Maine to Norway. The Center for Coastal Studies has a history of freeing these large whales and other marine mammals from entanglements; performing  these disentanglements under a permit issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

"Ultimately, what we're trying to do is see if we can actually just prevent whales from getting entangled in the first place," Landry said.

"The issue that they have faced is not fishing gear, per se. It's the rope that we use to make our fishing gear. And so when we asked for reduction entanglement to help whale populations, we're not asking for a reduction in fishing, we're just asking for a reduction of rope."

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Humpback whale calf freed from rope off Cape Cod as mother eats nearby