r/whales 9d ago

A Female North Atlantic Right Whale and her calf found entangled in rope off Massachusetts, and the calf is likely to die from injuries

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-two-endangered-whales-found-entangled-in-rope-off-massachusetts-and/
646 Upvotes

21 comments sorted by

44

u/One_Arm4148 9d ago

Damn it!!! Whyyyy?!?!? 💔😭 Help them!

39

u/Separate-Ad6636 9d ago

This is disguising and infuriating. They are endangered.

41

u/Far-Scar9937 9d ago

Fishing trash really is the most depressing shit I have ever educated myself on in this life

1

u/Vantriss 6d ago

I already hate humanity enough. I don't want to know more.

1

u/ktc653 6d ago

If you stop eating seafood then you can ignore it, knowing you’re not contributing

1

u/Vantriss 6d ago

But there's farm raised fish.

1

u/ktc653 6d ago

They feed farmed fish wild caught fish so unfortunately it’s all part of the same system. And with some types of carnivorous fish, the amount of wild caught fish fed to the farmed fish actually exceeds the amount of farmed fish generated. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/379564/fish-farming-sustainable-wild-caught

1

u/Vantriss 6d ago

I mean... no matter what kind of meat you eat, there's something unethical going on and I'm not willing to be vegetarian. Just a cold hard fact of life.

1

u/ktc653 6d ago

You don’t have to go 100%, even eating one veggie meal a day helps the whales. Are there any veg meals or products that you’ve tried and liked?

19

u/SurayaThrowaway12 8d ago

There are few things more frustrating than having well-documented and established manmade issues directly threatening a species/population with extinction that can be properly mitigated, and yet the species/population continues to decline due to the same issues. Also see the vaquita and the Southern Resident orcas.

3

u/thiiiipppttt 7d ago

We're doing it to ourselves. What would be inconsistent about taking them with us?

16

u/salpn 9d ago

Sickening and discouraging!

13

u/simplebirds 9d ago

Unforgivable

8

u/Radiant-Sherbert6128 9d ago

This is a huge problem😢😡

8

u/drilling_is_bad 8d ago

Small correction: 1 of the whales is a female of reproductive age--thankfully, her injuries are less severe and are not expected to lead to her death. Given that she is not in the southeast right now and wasn't an id-ed mother last year, I don't think she has a calf right now that would be affected. When I looked her up in the catalog, it doesn't look like she had ever been spotted with a calf. Her entanglement is bad, because she's less likely to give birth next year now and the entanglement could lead to infection, but less devastating overall.

NOAA update on the entanglements: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/endangered-species-conservation/north-atlantic-right-whale-updates

List of 2023-2024 moms: https://www.neaq.org/2023-2024-right-whale-mother-and-calf-pairs/

Right whale catalog (female is #4120): https://rwcatalog.neaq.org/#/whales

Sadly, the juvenile male reported entangled is likely to die from his injuries, which ~is~ very bad news. But he's not the calf of 4120

4

u/Jamska 8d ago

356 355 left

3

u/thiiiipppttt 7d ago

Not to shit on the feel goods, but for every heartwarming story we see about a whale rescued from fishing debris, there are thousands more we never know about.

2

u/tangotango112 6d ago

The fishing industry is a cancer on sea life. They pollute the waters more than anyone. They have overfished and left nothing sustainable. They illegally dump their winch wires, spools, nets, draggers, other equipment and oil and don't give af which results in tons of sea life death. The CG barely do shit about it either. They're the biggest snowflakes when it comes to renewable energy projects like the Wind farms.

Fishing permit days are getting shorter and shorter, at least for the scallop industry. Fuck em, those fishing fleet owners are all trashy too.

1

u/EndersGame_Reviewer 8d ago

Can anything be done to untangle the calf in a situation like this?

1

u/JungAtHeart_ 7d ago

And of course this is in Canadian news, NOT Massachusetts! I live in MA and haven’t seen anything about this

1

u/iamthewallrus 6d ago

Fuck fishing