The Saga of an Entangled Whale
A story from Pieter Folkens.
Entangled humpback whale
One of the key members of the Northern California whale disentanglement team, Pieter takes us step by step on a disentanglement mission. Pieter’s story-telling carries us along on the vessel with him, wondering if we’ll find the whale again, questioning whether the team will succeed, and hanging on when the whale, attached to his boat with lines, lashes out and gets everyone in the boat wet. It’s quite a ride for the whale, the rescuers and readers alike.
PIETER FOLKENS is currently deeply involved in large whale disentanglement. He’s a Level 4, the highest person on the permit in northern California. He got started with whale disentanglement in Alaska with the Alaska Whale Foundation. But the problem of entangled whales is serious in the Monterey Bay area.
Pieter is also engaged in writing books, is involved in Canine Search and Rescue, and is well known for his scientific illustrations, which have appeared in multiple books and posters. His latest illustration project is Marine Mammals, a highly detailed whale-watching guide. And he notes that he hasn’t had a day off in a year. Pieter’s current work depends on the day and his mood.
Pieter was born in Bakersfield, CA. He grew up ‘all over’ living in several foreign countries, as well as spending a lot of time in Alaska and the High Sierras.
His initial intro into the marine world and the Monterey Bay area came in the 1980s when Ken Norris requested that he come to Santa Cruz. Pieter then became Assistant Professor of Science Communications in the Division of Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, which had a close affiliation with the Long Marine Labs.
His interest in marine mammals came long before that, however. At the ‘ripe old age of 8’, Pieter went on a field trip with his 3rd grade class to….. There they discovered a fossil of a 13.5 million year old sperm whale. Pieter was so intrigued by the fossil that he got together a bunch of friends in the back of a Volkswagen the following summer for his birthday, and headed back up where they dug up the sperm whale fossil. He recounts that it was a small animal, mostly skull parts and teeth. In 1979, Pieter went back to the site with the LA County Museum of Natural History and they did a more extensive formal review of the marine mammal fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits, which is a well-known bone bed that covers a lot of the Central Valley.
Pieter is one of the founders of the Alaska Whale Foundation, now in its 20th year, started in 1996. He had met Fred Sharpe, who became Principal Investigator for AWF, a few years earlier. At that time, Pieter was a naturalist for Dolphin Charters and also a field agent for the National Marine Mammal Act. He met Fred in a backwater area and they got talking. Turns out they both had similar thoughts about the color pattern of Pacific humpback whale pectoral fins, and the possible adaption of the coloration as an aid to feeding. That collaboration led to Fred Sharpe’s seminal work on cooperative bubble-net feeding, plus other behavioral discoveries of humpback whales in Southeast Alaska.
You can watch Pieter’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/pTfzcxufS_g
THE SAGA OF THE ENTANGLED WHALE
On July 3rd, late morning of July 3rd, a report came in of an entangled humpback whale that was near Monterey Bay. The initial team to go out from Marine Life Studies (MLS) was very good. There was a photographer on board by the name of Doug Croft, and we started to get the initial photographs of the entanglement. It showed to be a pretty serious entanglement, something that had gone on for a while. The rope started to embed in the back of the animal. It was cutting into the mouth. The line clearly came over the head just behind the blowhole, in one side of the mouth, out the other side of the mouth, and then around a pectoral fin, and it was dragging behind.
The animal was clearly trying to get rid of the gear, but in that effort was just making the situation worse. We think the animal was dragging a lot of gear, and with the weight of that gear the animal was breaching, trying to get out of it. But it was simply cinching it up more and doing more damage.
Well the MLS folks saw the animal, they documented it, and we decided that we had to have a response. The first phase of the response is we wanted to get telemetry on the whale so we could keep track of where it’s going.
So we called for support from the Coast Guard, the motor lifeboat stationed there in Monterey, and they agreed to come out because of how well documented the entanglement was. They had our Level III responder come on down to meet up with them and transfer some gear.
Now the Coast Guard is starting to come out. Peggy Stap’s crew from Marine Life Studies is on the animal, watching it, and low and behold somebody in an open boat, with three adults and four kids, comes over to get a close-up look at the whale.
So this open boat with three adults, none of them wearing life jackets, and three kids, come over because they want to get their little whale watch in. Consequently, they wrap their propeller in the gear trailing off the entangled animal. It starts to pull their boat backwards and they’re taking on water over the transom. They go into a panic mode, and start yelling for help.
So Peggy calls the Coast Guard on Channel 16 saying, “We’ve got this situation where this whale has now gotten itself hooked up to this private boat that’s out there and now is being towed backwards.”
So the Coast Guard is coming out with our gear, but now they immediately have to go back, get our equipment and our people off, because it’s become a SAR mission, a search and rescue mission. So they go back and they take all our gear off, and they start to come back out, and by that time the guys who got themselves hung up in the whale reached over back and got their boat disentangled, then sped off, cause they knew the Coast Guard was coming out.
And so we called off the SAR mission, and the Coast Guard had to go back to pick up the deployment gear and our crew, who were part of the deployment team. All this time Peggy’s crew was standing by the animal and waiting, waiting for the disentanglement crew to come out. It was just snakebit from the start.
So, the Coast Guard finally comes out. By then it’s starting to get dark. I believe it was getting foggy as well. But they were able to successfully deploy our buoy, that big orange thing that has the telemetry on it, by attaching it to the gear trailing off the whale. We were planning on coming back the next day, and we got word the telemetry was working. All of our stations that had received the telemetry knew exactly where the whale was.
So the next day, we get the whole team together again – Marine Life Studies, Alaska Whale Foundation, and Sanctuary people – so we’re all ready to go. The ‘ping’ is showing us that our whale is off of Pt. Sur. It’s gone way down south.
So now we’ve got to move all of our assets and go way down the coast and try to find it. And with our Argos satellite tracking system, we have a delay. The way Argos works is when the whale comes up to the surface, if it stays long enough at the surface for the telemetry buoy to be floating at the surface, then in order to get a reading, it’s got to happen at the same time there’s a satellite coming over the top.
So if the surfacing and the satellite happen at the same time, we get an upload of the information of where the animal is. That information goes to, I think some place in Africa or France, and then somebody at that end cleans up the data and then posts it on the internet to where we then go to our account and see where the animal is. So there’s this delay of twenty minutes or so before we get that. Meanwhile our animal is moving.
So we’re getting these fixes and we’re getting a sense of where the animal is. To zero in on the animal we use a VHF antenna to find out where it is in that moment, as opposed to waiting twenty minutes for the Argos information. The problem with the VHF is that if you start getting a ‘ping’ – you use the antennae kind of like this – when you start getting a ‘ping,’ it could be that direction or it could be exactly behind us.
So we’re using two antennas. We’re trying to triangulate, and we’re having a heck of a time finding out where this animal is. And one of the confounding things is that there are a dozen blue whales down there. And there’s fifty or sixty humpback whales. We stopped counting at that amount – there were probably more. There were fin whales down there and all sorts of critters down there feeding.
And so we’re trying to get ‘ beep, beep’, ‘ping’ coming off this whale, with all these other whales around, and you might have several of them surfacing at the same time. So we’ve got two fairly substantial boats out there all trying to find out where this dang thing went.
Well, late in the day, late in the afternoon we finally found it. We knew exactly where it was. We’re on this animal. We launch our cut boat, and we go up on it[1]. In the boat is Jim Holme, Ryan Berger and myself. We get up on the animal and we find out there’s just this immense wad of crap underneath the animal. It wasn’t just going around the mouth and around the flipper, underneath it, it was all tangled, and wrapped around with just literally hundreds of feet of line and buoys and all sorts of stuff.
So when we respond on these things we have attainable goals that we set for the time period that we have. We don’t say that we’re going to go disentangle that animal no matter what. We make very defined goals. We’re going to do this at this point, this at this point and so forth and we do it in steps. What that does is that forces us to check our safety levels, our enthusiasm levels. When you’re out in the cut boat, you have to be really even emotionally, because if somebody gets too excited, “WE’VE GOT TO SAVE THIS THING,” you know you end up with a loss of situational awareness, and that’s when you’re going to end up with problems.
So we come back to report to everybody on the big boat, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary’s R/V Fulmar. We’re saying, “This is what we’re seeing.” But it’s starting to get dark. And do we do something or do we have to leave it and come back another day?
Well, the two people in charge, Chris, who’s the Master on Fulmar and myself say, “You know, we’ve put so much effort into getting out here. We have all our safety stuff in gear.” Holme, myself, Chris and Marshall, all of us have had night operations training, so we know what we’re doing. We’ve got reflectives all over the boat. And we say “You know what? We ought to give it another shot.” Marshall offered me a headlamp. I said, “I don’t want that. I want to have all my peripheral vision.” As long as we’ve got twilight I want to be able to see it.
So the goal was simply to get rid of the crap underneath the animal. So we go out there, and we attach to the animal[2]. We’re coming over the bow, and the animal is still pretty darn healthy, even though the animal wasn’t very old, and it was all tangled up. Boy those puppies are strong!
And so we’re holding down on the animal on the bow so we can work ourselves up to it, so we can access to where all the crap is. And several times the animal dove and it swamped our boat to where it just filled up with water. We were hoping to keep the animal at the surface, but when that happened, we had to let go, and then circle with the engines and get the water out, and then get back up on it.
So we finally get to advance our floats enough to where we could cut away all the crap, so that the only thing (entanglement) that was left was the mouth, the flipper, one line that was loose and one line that had our telemetry buoy on it. We had taken off two hundred pounds worth of crap maybe. But we kept floatation on one line, hoping that the extra weight would pull the line through the mouth. Then we went home. It was the Fourth of July, and that was the second operational period.
As we’re going home fireworks are going off. We’re watching them in the distance, so we had our fireworks for Fourth of July. We get back to Monterey and the guys on the Fulmar allowed us to stay overnight. The next morning we go out there again. We’ve got the Argos system working, and we find the whale right away. We knew exactly where it was. We go out there and we get on it.
We’re trying to figure out exactly what’s going on, so we start to do the more advanced analysis. In the second operational period it was too dark for us to get any pictures underwater. So on this third operational period, we needed to get a thorough understanding of exactly how severe the entanglement was. During the day, the animal was just frustrating us, because it was feeding while we were trying to do that. It was also somewhat curious about what we were doing. We’ve got video in which we’re on the animal, holding onto it. We’ve moved up onto the fluke. And we’ve got our underwater camera on it, and the animal dives down and comes up, and you can see the animal looking at us. He just comes up and takes a look at us, and he rolls forward and keeps going.
We’re attached to the animal at this time. By attached I mean we’re holding on to what we call our working line, while the animal does what it’s doing. Ryan was the point person at the time. He’s trying to get an angle on it, so on and so forth. We’re photographing from the Fulmar, and this animal starts to circle back onto our response boat and it starts to lunge feed right at our boat.
The animal’s trying to be a whale, while we’re trying to help him. The fact is that there’s a line across its mouth and it’s still dragging a bunch of crap. Mouth entanglements are the hardest ones to deal with, because the whale’s not going to let us get up close to its head. So we have a technique where we use Prusik[3] loops with floatation, so that we can work ourselves up, because we know exactly where the danger zone is. This way we can control our approach right up to the edge of that danger zone and still be in a safe situation.
There were a couple of times the animal actually tried to lash out at us and got us all wet, but we were still in the safe zone. We knew we were operating within our own defined parameters of safety. But this animal would just go down and come back and feed, would go down and come back and feed.
Late in the operational period we decide that probably the best thing we can do really, is reduce the entanglement hoping that there will only be a slight wrap around the right side of the animal, with the telemetry buoy on the other side, hoping it would be loosened up so it would pull it through by the next day.
We’ve had several entanglements where just the presence of our telemetry buoy is enough to pull all the crap off. By then Chris calls around trying to find a place to park Fulmar. We’re at Half Moon Bay at that point, which is a long way to get back to Monterey. So the Harbor Master gave us a place in Pillar Point. We got in there 9:00-9:30pm or so and Ryan, Holme and I are just dead tired.
It’s the third operational period. We’re done, and we’re just kind of sitting in the salon and kinda looking like death warmed over, and Erin who’s part of the Fulmar crew said, “All right, what do you guys want to eat?” And we’re like “whatever”. She goes off to Safeway to get us salads and burritos and sandwich makings and all sorts of stuff. So we go to bed, we’re dead tired, wake up refreshed. When you’re dead tired like that, you sleep really hard, so you wake up really well.
Next day we’re starting our fourth operational period and we find the animal. We’re starting to get really good at finding this animal really quick. We immediately go out and re-find it, and so we’re on it. We attach to the animal, and we find that where we had made the cut had moved up on the animal about five or six feet. We’re thinking, holy shitskies, that idea of using the flotation might be enough to pull it off. So if it worked that much, perhaps hooking the boat to the whale will add more floatation to help pull it off. And so we did that, and again when I say that’s what we did, we took one of our buoys and we had it over the bow of the boat. For about the first hour, Ryan was holding onto it thinking that he’d hold onto the whale, and I said, “Ryan you’re gonna be so tired here if you keep that up.”
We had the buoy over the bow and I wedged it with my knee so that if the animal dove all we had to do was kick it over and we’d be good to go. So the animal was towing us along at 4 ½-5 knots. Not for ten minutes, not for a half hour, not for an hour, but three or four hours. Just continually doing this! All right? When is this gonna be resolved? (Laughter)
So by then we’ve tried a number of techniques. We’ve even brought up the Fulmar to come up close to the animal to kinda see if we could get the whale to move. Imagine the situation: we have our boat attached to the whale and it’s going in this direction. The entanglement is all on the right side of the head. What we want to have happen is we want the animal to move away, so that the line opens up, so we can then have a chance to go at it to cut it farther up forward.
I call in Fulmar to come in closer and get off our quarter, hoping the noise of the Fulmar will cause the animal to move away from the Fulmar. That doesn’t happen. What does the whale do? The whale turns into the Fulmar and crosses its bow to where our support crew on the Fulmar is looking over the front and they get a look at the whale, and they can see exactly what’s going on.
They can see the degree of entanglement. What happened was, was the line, as it was coming out of the left side of the mouth, was being pressed against one of the nares, or nostrils (blow holes) to the point where the nare had become very swollen, and the whale could breathe only out of one of the nares. Obviously, the situation was not going to resolve by itself.
Over the next few hours Ryan and I discussed what we should do next. We decided what we needed to do to give the animal the best chance was try to remove as much of the entanglement as we could. We’d already gotten rid of 95% of it, so we wanted to go that extra little bit where the only part that would still be on the animal was a wrap around the pec and what went through the mouth. Anything trailing would be cut as close to the animal as we could.
So we did that. We hooked up the knife. Put the pole out 35 feet and walked ourselves up as close to the animal, as close as we thought we could be. Before we did the cut, we wanted to make sure this animal wasn’t going to freak out at us. So we did some sensitization in which we took the pole and we would tap it on the back to see what the reaction was. And the first one we got a little bit of a buck. And the second time the animal, it actually turned around and looked at us, “What is this?” Then we’d give it a while and then we would touch it again to the point where the animal wouldn’t react at all.
At that point we figured we’d be safe to go ahead and make the cut. So we moved the knife up, and moved it up just above the pectoral fin and the line that was going over it. Well the line actually went under the pec and went up over the back. We went up to the pectoral fin – we were able to get the knife underneath the line, pull it and we cut it. And the animal bolted.
And all this while, I think the slowest the animal had gone was 3 ½ knots. We’re talking about ten hours on the water. We finally cut it free and it took off. So what we did was, we gave the animal the best chances for survival. But now that there was no drag on the line, this line should have started to relax. Through the healing process, you know when you get a splinter, the splinter kind of moves to the outside. We hoped that would happen with the whale also. So what we believe is, because the animal was so strong when we left it, because there was no more drag on it, we felt the entanglement would eventually resolve itself.
Thank you for sharing your story with us Pieter!
