A southern right whale that spent days tangled in a cray pot line off the bottom of the South Island is swimming free again, to the relief of the Rakiura fishing community and the conservation staff who watched over it.
The whale, a sub-adult male about nine metres long, was first reported by a fisher on Saturday in waters off Rakiura, the island better known as Stewart Island. It was last seen on Saturday afternoon between Lucky Point and Saddle Point, with a rope from a rock lobster pot wound around its tail. A fully grown southern right whale can reach about 15 metres, so this animal still had plenty of growing to do.
Jennifer Ross from the Department of Conservation’s Stewart Island team told RNZ that the rope had effectively pinned the whale in place. “The rope had tangled around the whale’s tail, and it was effectively anchored to the ground there and wasn’t able to move too far,” she said.
Despite being held fast, the whale was not in obvious distress. Conservation staff checked its breathing and filmed it so whale experts elsewhere could assess the situation from the video. By the standards of marine mammal entanglements it was holding up well, breathing comfortably and rolling occasionally rather than thrashing against the line.
Because the animal could not be freed straight away, a specialist whale disentanglement team was called in from Kaikōura, several hundred kilometres up the coast, and made the long trip south to Rakiura. In the meantime a whale expert managed to attach a satellite tag on Monday so the animal could be tracked if it moved off before help arrived.
That is more or less what happened. The whale worked itself loose on Monday night near the spot where it had first been found. When the Kaikōura team relocated the animal on Tuesday it was in a different position and swimming freely, the rope no longer holding it down. After days of careful watching, the rescue ended with the whale simply moving on under its own power.
For the fishers who first raised the alarm, the outcome was the one they had been hoping for. Kathryn Molloy, chief executive of the CRA8 Rock Lobster Industry Association, said the community was hugely relieved. “We are so relieved this whale is free. The Rakiura fishing community cares deeply about the ocean and everything in it,” she told the Otago Daily Times.
Molloy credited the fisher who reported the whale and stayed in the area rather than carrying on with the day’s work. “Our fishers did exactly the right thing, and today’s outcome is a testament to what happens when people who work on the water take their responsibilities seriously,” she said.
She also pointed to how much each animal matters given the species’ history. Southern right whales were hunted to the brink of extinction in New Zealand waters during the nineteenth century, when shore whaling stations dotted the southern coast and the animals were killed in their thousands. They were given the name “right” whales by whalers because they were the right ones to catch, slow swimmers that floated when dead and were rich in oil. The population around the mainland has been crawling back ever since, which is why a single tangled whale draws this kind of effort. “Their slow recovery from near-extinction makes every individual precious,” Molloy said.
The bulk of the surviving population breeds around the subantarctic Auckland Islands and Campbell Island, far to the south, but sightings around Rakiura and the southern mainland have become more common in recent winters as numbers slowly climb. Each animal that survives to breed adds to a recovery that is measured in decades rather than years.
Entanglement in fishing gear remains one of the everyday hazards for large whales anywhere they share water with commercial fisheries. Lines running from the seabed up to floating pot buoys are easy for a moving whale to catch on a flipper or fluke, and once a wrap takes hold the animal can drag gear for long distances. The work of cutting a whale loose is slow and risky for the people involved, which is why trained disentanglement teams, rather than well-meaning bystanders, are the ones who take it on.
Molloy said the industry would treat the close call as a prompt to look at how to lower the risk in future. “CRA8 will be working with DOC and the wider fishing sector to review how we can better protect whales in these waters going forward,” she said.
For now the result is a happy one. A young whale that could easily have died anchored to the bottom is back on the move off the southern coast, and the people who fish those waters can take some quiet satisfaction in having looked out for it.
Have you seen a whale off the southern coast this winter, or been involved in a rescue like this one? Share your story in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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