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The most difficult thing is locating the whale. They can spend many minutes underwater and emerge meters ahead. For Astrid Frisch Jordán, biologist and national coordinator of the National Netted Whale Care Network (Raben), “it is like finding a needle in a haystack.” Professional rescuers go out in two small inflatable boats in search of a location that they received through a WhatsApp report with photographs of the cetacean that can be found. Once located, they use a hook tied to a buoy to attach themselves to the net or fishing gear that pulls the whale from which they want to free it. It's a bit like the way they hunted them before, but without hurting them. “Then we put more buoys on it to slow it down, especially so that it remains on the surface a little longer,” says Frisch. And they use knives with an inward tip to avoid cutting the whale and an extension to avoid getting too close. Each rescue is different from the last. Sometimes it takes days to completely untangle them with trips back to the mainland at dusk; That's why it's important to find it again.
Since 1970, entanglements have been a factor limiting the recovery of marine mammal species and a huge source of human mortality and injury to whales around the world. Entanglements occur in all types of fishing operations, from industrial warehouses to artisanal fisheries and occur when mammals encounter different types of fishing gear that include nets, ropes or material abandoned at sea, which become tangled around their body. According to the scientific article published this year by Frisch Jordán together with Diana C. López Arzate, because a large part of whale species migrate between continental waters, where 95% of fishing occurs, they have a high risk of becoming entangled. in fishing equipment. If left untreated, the whale can stop feeding and die.
Astrid Frisch and Karel Beets are a couple and moved from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta in 1996 to run the ecotourism travel agency Ecotours de México that they started in 1991 with the idea of giving something back to nature on every trip. At the same time, Astrid took photographs of the whales' tails for her own research catalog and, after identifying similarities with those of other researchers, she proposed unifying them. Her hobby became a civil association called Ecology and Conservation of Whales (Ecobac), which informs, documents, investigates and disseminates the conservation of the humpback whale and its habitat.
Astrid Frisch heads to the Marietas Islands as part of her research tour.Paola Margu
The rescue of entangled whales, which ended up becoming its flagship program, was not part of the initial plan. But on January 3, 2004, they received a report of a whale entangled in gillnets (the most common in Mexico), or chinchorros, as it is known colloquially. “I'm sorry, but there is nothing we can do,” Frisch says he responded, because they were not dedicated to rescuing whales. In fact, no one in Mexico did it. By the third call it was more than obvious that they had to prepare to leave in case they were looking for them again. It was rare for a whale to stay in the bay for four days. On the fourth call, they bought garden tools and two boats left with tour operators, fisheries researchers, personnel from the 8th Naval Zone of Puerto Vallarta, and Ecobac and “as God gave them to understand” they released the whale.
Frisch then secured training with Daniel Mattila, one of the top rescuers at the International Whaling Commission, for herself, Beets, and another rescuer: Ricky Rebolledo. Thus, they created the first Raben team, which continues to operate with volunteers from public institutions and private companies. Later, with the support of the National Commission of Protected Areas (Conanp), they trained 15 different teams until 2016.
“We took a lot of risks in that first rescue, but because of my training and logic I didn't let anyone go into the water,” says Frisch during a research trip in February 2024. “It's always people's first reaction because the animal "It is in the water and it is not easy to get close to it in a boat, but it is a large, stressed animal whose attitude can change from one moment to the next." Not going into the water became the number one rule of their protocol for rescuing entangled whales. Now, more than 200 volunteer rescuers in the Mexican Pacific and Gulf of California must follow it to the letter.
In 20 years of work, the organization has received 240 calls for help in the
Rabenmobile
, of which 218 were confirmed with photographs and evidence of entanglement and 94 were completely freed. However, these cases are underrepresentations of the problem, since these migratory animals are only treated if they are near the coast by specialized teams. Rescuers are now receiving reports of whales observed with drones from the beach, which represents a new challenge for them to locate them.
Worldwide, the entanglement problem is little known and, in Mexico, the first scientific article dedicated to the subject was the one published by Frisch and López. In it, they identified eight species of whales, with the humpback being the most common in Mexican waters. According to the study, the fishing gear in which whales become most entangled is gillnets, including 80% of cases of double entanglement involving a mother and her calf; 23.4% are vessels, such as those used to fish for crab, which increased reports from 2015 to 2020. 10.1% of the cases were rope and buoy, and 9.1% were abandoned equipment, of which the 57.9% were associated with entangled hatchlings. Gillnets also represent a higher incidence of mortality for whales entangled in them, since 66% of reports with this fishing gear died. Although the percentage of deaths after attempted release was only 7.8%.
Map of RABEN teams on the Pacific coast and Gulf of California in 2023ECOBAC
One of Ecobac's intentions is for fishermen in Mexico to mark their fishing gear, as they do in Canada and the United States, as this makes it easier to know where the whale became entangled and how far it traveled until it was treated by the team. This information gives them tools to better understand their migration customs and prevent accidents in localized areas.
“The cases we have had of whale deaths mean a great loss, especially the females, which are reproductive animals. It's a lot of frustration when you can't find it or you can't locate it or you can't release it completely, because you do your best and you can't always be successful,” says Frisch. Like all members of the team, she must keep a cool head during the rescue to make the best decisions in moments of tension.
Since 2016, both the Government of Mexico and the United States have cut funds for conservation, so Ecobac collaborates with NGOs, foundations and private donors to raise funds for both rescues and research. According to the report
Caring for what matters PPEF 2024
by the Nossa collective (Noroeste Civil Society for Environmental Sustainability), “Mexico's protected natural areas, key to confronting the climate emergency, barely have 10.7 pesos (0.64 dollars) ) per hectare for its management and conservation in 2024, while in 2016 (the year with the largest budget in Conanp) 26.5 pesos (1.60 dollars) per hectare were spent, which was already insufficient. Conanp's budget has been the lowest in the last 3 years (2022-2024) since 2012.
In 2016, humpback whales also began to change their distribution due to global warming, causing them to get stuck in crab fishing traps, and entanglements more than doubled in just one year. “They had like three years in a row a crazy amount of 70-plus reports,” Frisch says. “Unfortunately sometimes you need drastic things for governments to invest.” A ban was then established which, in turn, generated a loss of millions of dollars for the crab fishery, and the US Government had to invest millions of dollars to improve systems and reduce entanglements.
Researchers advocate prevention to prevent this problem from continuing to occur. Ecobac and Conanp have created brochures and held three prevention workshops for the fishermen of Guerrero Negro, in Oaxaca del Sur; San Blas, Nayarit, and Puerto Ángel, in Oaxaca, to teach them preventive techniques such as not leaving the nets unattended during whale season, or lighting them at night to draw the attention of the cetaceans in some way so that they can move away from the net. Raben continues despite the difficulties with the participation of all the volunteers, perhaps because of the hypnotic effect of finding a whale in front of you which, for the biologists interviewed, was love at first sight.
A pair of humpback whales swims in Banderas Bay, where tourism has triggered an increase in collisions between whales and boats.Paola Margu