In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the grey whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole.
Tangled around its tail was a polypropylene rope used to pull up crab traps. It took two men with serrated knives 40 minutes to free the whale, which swam away with a small piece of rope still embedded in its skin. That was in 2004, off the waters of Waldport, Oregon.
Humpbacks, which migrate off Oregon's coast, and other whales can get caught in the vertical ropes connected to the heavy traps and drag them around for months, leaving the mammals injured, starved or so exhausted that they can drown. The debate in the Pacific Northwest is a microcosm of the broader struggle nationwide to address the urgent problem of whale entanglements without wiping out commercial fishermen. California and the U.S. East Coast have taken similar actions to protect whales.
There are two distinct populations of humpback whales in West Coast waters. The Mexico population is classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. These whales breed and calve along the Pacific coast of Mexico and feed from California to Alaska's Aleutian Islands. In the last decade, nine humpbacks were entangled in Oregon Dungeness crab gear. In 2022, two were tied to the state, NOAA reported.
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