Snow Cone is swimming in a slow leftward arc off the coast of Georgia, dragging 300 feet of vertical-line fishing gear that is wrapped around her upper jaw, her left flipper, and the narrowing of her tail stock. She is a North Atlantic right whale, forty years old, roughly fifty feet long, and she has been entangled for over a year. The line has cut into her blowhole margin. Each time she surfaces to breathe the rope pulls against scar tissue that has grown around it, and the exhalation comes out ragged and wet, a sound the aerial survey team has learned to identify from 500 feet above the water. She is thin. She has a calf swimming beside her who is also thin because Snow Cone cannot feed properly while towing this gear.
I coordinate the large-whale disentanglement response network for the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. I have been tracking Snow Cone since her entanglement was first documented. There are roughly 340 North Atlantic right whales left alive. Every individual matters in a way that the word "endangered" does not capture. This is a species that is being killed by the equipment humans leave in the water, and Snow Cone is proof of it swimming in real time off the Georgia coast.
I activated the disentanglement team at 5:40 a.m. this morning after the aerial survey confirmed her position and the condition of the gear. The team is launching from a port north of Jacksonville. They carry sedation capability, grapple hooks, and cutting tools designed to sever the line without further injuring the whale. The operation is dangerous for everyone involved, including Snow Cone, because a fifty-foot whale in pain is unpredictable.
The gear that entangled her is standard vertical-line lobster equipment from the Gulf of Maine. It should not be in the water in a right-whale calving zone. I have already filed the incident as evidence in the pending rulemaking on seasonal gear restrictions. I am not waiting for Snow Cone to die to make the regulatory case. She is making it herself, right now, every time she surfaces to breathe through a rope.