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Right Whale Sedation Enables Rescue Effort
On Friday, March 6, 2009, for reportedly the first time ever, a North Atlantic right whale that had been severely entangled in fishing gear, was administered a sedation mixture that made it possible for rescuers to remove 90 percent of the entanglement. The rescue involved the efforts of a multi-institutional team including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), NOAA Fisheries, which manages the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network based at the Provincetown (MA) Center for Coastal Studies, the University of Florida's Aquatic Animal Health Program, Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and Coastwise Consulting Group. Team members on four boats assisted by an aerial survey plane worked for two days to free the animal. Eventually they succeeded in injecting the 40-foot, 40,000-pound whale with a mixture of sedatives that allowed them to cut away the gear that wrapped around the animal's head. The new sedation delivery system built by Trevor Austin of Paxarms New Zealand, comprises a 12-inch needle and a syringe driven by compressed air, which injects the drug into the whale's muscle. "This tool enhances fishing gear removal from entangled whales and minimizes the added stress from repeated boat approaches to the animals," said Michael Moore, a veterinarian and research biologist at WHOI. Moore has led the investigation into chemical and physical tools to facilitate and enhance the safety of large whale restraint during efforts to remove entangling fishing gear. "It's gratifying to have successfully employed this new technique." The animal (New England Aquarium catalog No: 3311) was first sighted entangled east of Brunswick, Ga., on Jan. 14, 2009, by the Georgia Wildlife Trust aerial survey team, which noted multiple lengths of heavy line cutting in to the whale's upper jaw and left lip and trailing behind the animal. It was tagged with a telemetry buoy by the Georgia DNR to allow it to be tracked. Several disentanglement attempts proved unsuccessful, as the animal was unapproachable for a rescue effort. On Friday, March 6, a further increase in the dose resulted in a marked switch from the expected evasiveness. An hour after injection of sedatives, the animal no longer evaded boat approaches, but instead tolerated repeated close approaches by a disentanglement boat to allow removal of 90 percent of the remaining rope. Veterinarians on the team calculated the dosage based on experience sedating animals in captivity, starting low through the clinical range until they found a safe and effective level. "Our prior experience with using these drugs safely in dolphins, beluga whales, killer whales and other species gave us the initial levels of sedatives to start with," said Mike Walsh a veterinarian and associate director of the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine's Aquatic Animal Health program.
April 2009
16 MTR
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