How fishing gear entanglement affects humpback whale welfare and what disentanglement programs achieve.
Humpback whale entanglement causes welfare harm that is severe both in intensity and duration. A whale dragging fishing gear for weeks experiences exhaustion, rope wounds cutting to bone, impaired feeding, and in many cases a prolonged death. Disentanglement by trained teams saves individual animals and provides welfare benefit at meaningful scale. However, the long-term solution requires reducing entanglement risk through gear modification and ropeless fishing technology. The welfare case for accelerating ropeless gear adoption is compelling given the documented suffering of entangled whales and the availability of technical solutions.