The plight of a gray whale whose head and neck are tangled in a large metal frame has inspired a growing effort among whale advocates to find, track and possibly free the animal — against long odds.
Whale watchers first spotted the gray whale, whose age and gender are not known, at Dana Point off the coast of Orange County, California, on April 1 as it swam north toward its summer feeding grounds in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska.
Gray whales take two 5,000-mile migrations a year. From January to May, they travel north from their warm calving lagoons off Baja California in Mexico to the food-rich, cold seas of Alaska, where they fatten up for the return trip to Mexico in late summer.
The whale that is entangled in the metal framework seemed to move slower than the rest, and it was being left behind except for one whale that stayed nearby, according to observers quoted in news reports.
Read more at The Register-Guard.
