By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES, June 28 (Reuters) - Marine mammal rescue teams alerted boaters off Southern California on Tuesday to be on the lookout for a blue whale ensnared in the rigging of a commercial crab trap, a day after initial efforts to free the giant creature failed. Rescuers spent an entire day trying to cut free the 80-foot-long (24-meter-long) whale on … [Read more...]
Blue Whale Spotted Tangled in Fishing Line Off California May Now Be in Mexico
Earlier footage of the whale spotted off California: Sept 7 (Reuters) - A blue whale that was spotted last week entangled in fishing wire off the Southern California coast might have moved hundreds of miles south to Mexico, still towing a line and a red buoy, officials said on Monday. The U.S. Coast Guard said a vessel reported seeing a blue whale tangled in fishing … [Read more...]
Blue Whales Can’t Avoid Large Ships, Says Stanford Biologist
BY BJORN CAREY, Stanford University For millions of years, blue whales have cruised the world's oceans with hardly a care, their sheer size making them largely free from predator attacks. The downside to being the largest animals in history, however, is that the species was never pressured to evolve defensive behaviors. Now, the first direct observations of blue whales … [Read more...]
Blue Whales Under Increased Threat of Ship Strikes Off California, Study Finds
Blue whales off the West Coast of the United States are under an increased threat of injury and mortality from ship strikes and only slight changes in shipping lanes could be a huge boon for whale safety, a comprehensive 15-year analysis conducted by Oregon State University has found. The analysis tracked the movements of satellite-tagged blue whales off the U.S. West Coast … [Read more...]