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  • 2006-04-24 (xsd:date)
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  • Does This Photograph Show a Saved Whale Saying 'Thanks'? (en)
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  • At about 8:30 AM on Sunday, 11 December 2005, a crab fisherman working the open waters east of the Farallon Islands, about 18 miles off the coast of San Francisco, spotted a whale that had become entangled in the nylon ropes that link crab pots. The whale was a female humpback, about 45 to 50 feet in length and weighing an estimated 50 tons, who had likely become snared while traversing the humpbacks' usual migratory route between the Northern California coast and Baja California: Example: [Collected via e-mail, December 2010] A rescue team was hastily assembled, and by 2:30 PM divers had evaluated the situation and determined that the imperiled whale was so badly entangled in the crab pot lines that the only way to save her was to dive beneath the surface and cut the nylon ropes that were ensnaring her. As James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, reported: Four divers spent about an hour cutting the nylon ropes with a special curved knife, a risky undertaking since a single flip of the gargantuan mammal's tail could easily have killed any of them. Eventually they freed the humpback, a feat that a representative of the Marine Mammal Center (MMC) in Marin County described as the first successful attempt on the West Coast to free an entangled humpback. The divers told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that the whale seemingly thanked them for its deliverance once the rescue operation was complete: While the textual element to this item is largely truth-based, the accompanying photograph (as shown above) has nothing to do with the referenced event: it captures an encounter between cameraman Marco Queral and a 50-ft. female humpback whale which took place nearly four years later in the South Pacific. Another image of an ensnared sea denizen has also been used in conjunction with this item, although it too does not depict the event described. This picture shows what was described in news accounts as a different whale photographed trying to escape from a net in which it had become trapped off Australia's Gold Coast in September 2005: (en)
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