At least 45 whales were entangled by fishing ropes and line on the east coast in 2024, and experts are calling for better management of fishing gear in Australia to prevent marine suffering.
Dr Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist at Griffith University, said the issue of preventing whale entanglements was “largely ignored in Australia”.
Meynecke and his team recorded 45 confirmed entanglements on the country’s east coast last year, but he believes the true figure is about 100. “They’re really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Only about 15 whales were successfully disentangled in 2024, and improving disentanglement efforts on the east coast would require better coordination across multiple jurisdictions, Meynecke said.
Emblematic of the problem, he added, was the case of a juvenile humpback spotted near South West Rocks in New South Wales on 5 December in bad condition, dragging rope and floats from its tail.
Two weeks later, on 17 December, it was spotted further south near Terrigal. Meynecke estimated from drone footage that the whale was travelling 1.2km/h – so slowly that it was “literally floating south” with the east Australian current.
A rescue mission successfully removed the rope and floats, but the whale died and washed up days later at Lakes beach in Budgewoi. Meynecke estimated it had “dragged the fishing gear for at least two months”.
While the number of confirmed yearly entanglements is small compared to the now healthy population of humpbacks – some 40,000 whales are estimated to migrate annually along Australia’s east coast – Meynecke said preventing such incidents was an ethical issue.
The constant drag of rope and floats over time slowly causes a whale to succumb to exhaustion. “It’s probably the worst way of dying for any marine … animal,” Meynecke said.
“It takes weeks to several months until they actually die,” he said. “When they are on their migration … they would have to travel thousands of kilometres. Even the smallest float around the tail would mean, over several weeks, a loss of all energy reserves.”
The Sea World Foundation was involved in 10 humpback whale rescues in Queensland and New South Wales last year.
Wayne Phillips, Sea World’s head of marine sciences, said because humpbacks migrate rather than feed along Australia’s east coast, fishing gear was usually entangled on the whales’ tails.
“In other areas of the world, they’ll get a lot of entanglements through the mouth and around the head area, which makes it really difficult to disentangle, because the animals are using their mouths to scoop feed,” he said.
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“We do see some animals that appear to have been entangled for quite a while, and you can tell by their body condition how emaciated they are, by the amount of sea lice that’s gathering on that whale because it’s not swimming at normal speeds, and also how deep the entanglement is cutting into the animal’s body.
“There’s a lot of times when we’ll get out to an entanglement where we just think, this animal should just probably be put to sleep,” he said.
But due to their size, whales cannot be safely euthanised.
Phillips cautioned members of the public not to cut fishing gear from whales they encounter themselves, noting it can hinder rescue teams from completely disentangling the animals.
Meynecke said that preventing entanglements required better management of fishing gear. Whale entanglements were usually caused by fish traps and crab pot lines, and he highlighted a need to modify commercial gear to “start working with less line”.
He suggested another solution was coordination with scientists to vary the location of fishing sites depending on whale migration routes, rather than shutting down fisheries outright.
“Most fishermen have no interest, of course, in catching whales and it’s actually very annoying for them because they lose quite a lot of gear.”
Phillips added: “It would be great if the fisheries [authorities] all work together across state lines and make sure that people are responsible for their fishing gear and that they report gear that’s gone missing.”
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