A trained team from the Large Whale Entanglement Response Network freed a humpback whale that had been entangled in lines from crab traps off Monterey, California, since October 2024. Whale watching boats had first reported the whale entangled and helped the team find it to remove the gear in early April.
“All the passengers aboard wanted a follow up because they wanted to know what happened to the whale,” said Kate Cummings, captain and owner of Blue Ocean Whale Watch in Moss Landing, California. “It’s great news to share, so we are letting them know.”
Whale watchers and response teams had collected photos and other records of the whale off California over about 10 years that helped identify it when it became entangled. Researchers identified the whale as “Check,” who is part of the endangered humpback whale population that migrates between Central America and the West Coast.
Whale watch vessels first reported the entangled whale in October 2024, when it appeared to be entangled in lines and buoys from a Dungeness crab trap. They saw it only a few times, though, and responders could not find the whale again amid the deteriorating winter weather. However, they did locate and free another entangled whale.
On March 22, 2025, whale watch boats again reported an entangled humpback whale off Monterey. The network recognized the whale as Check and found it entangled in lines from two additional crab traps. On March 24, a team attached a telemetry buoy to the trailing entangling gear to track its movement.
Signals from the buoy allowed a team to quickly relocate the whale on March 25 and remove more than 400 feet of rope it was trailing. But fog—and as many as five other whales travelling very closely and energetically with Check—made it unsafe to continue to approach the whale. So the team reattached the tracking buoy to the end of the entangling gear and returned to port.
The signals from the telemetry buoy showed the whale moved close to 30 miles offshore at times, making it difficult to reach. Poor weather kept them at bay for another week. But they had used a camera to get underwater video of the entangled ropes around the whale, and plotted a strategy to remove them.
Weather Window Opens
A weather window opened the morning of Saturday, April 5. A team from The Marine Mammal Center, Marine Life Studies, and Cascadia Research Collective reached the whale, which had returned near the coast off Pacific Grove, California. They attached large buoys to slow the whale and keep the entangled ropes near the surface. One team grabbed the entangling line so the whale towed them as they made a carefully orchestrated series of cuts to the ropes.
“When you make that final cut suddenly you are not moving with the whale anymore and you feel it right away,” said Peggy Stap, executive director of Marine Life Studies. Doug Sandilands of Cascadia Research Collective said that once the humpback was free, it quickly swam away with another whale. “This is a hopeful sign that it might be strong enough to recover,” he said.
Sandilands said the entanglement response network and researchers will keep an eye out for Check in the coming months to see how the whale recovers. “This was an unusually long entanglement, and while we are hopeful it will survive, it will be important to continue documenting Check to see that it makes a full recovery,” he said.
Dr. Julia O’Hern, associate director of Cetacean Conservation Biology at The Marine Mammal Center, praised the local whale watch community for helping to track the whale and monitor its condition over such a long period. “Usually we try to reach entangled whales quickly, but for various reasons we followed this one for almost 6 months before we could finally get it done,” she said. “Fortunately, the whale was finally freed.”
Justin Viezbicke, California stranding coordinator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region, said the great coordination among entanglement response groups over an extended period helped the whale survive in the end. “This was a sustained effort by a lot of people to get there and help this animal,” he said. “Fortunately we did.”
To report an injured, dead, or stranded marine mammal contact NOAA’s West Coast Stranding Hotline at (866) 767-6114. To report an entangled marine mammal, call NOAA’s Entanglement Reporting Hotline at (877) SOS-WHAL/(877) 767-9425. For other incidents or other violations, contact NOAA’s Enforcement Hotline at (800) 853-1964.
