Two humpback whales, a mother and her calf, were entangled in a shark net off Queensland’s Rainbow Beach on Saturday, prompting urgent calls to rescue officials from members of the public.
The state’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI) said it heard reports of the entanglements just before 6am and members with the agency’s shark control program and marine animal release team (MART) were on the scene at Rainbow Beach, about 245km north of Brisbane, around 10.30am to start work on freeing the animals.
Pauline Jacob, the deputy director for general fisheries and forestry for the DPI, said rescue work was still ongoing on Saturday afternoon.
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Jacob urged the public to call in experts during any incident involving wildlife stuck in shark netting but to avoid attempts to release any animals themselves.
“While our contractor was monitoring the situation and waiting for the MART team to arrive, interference from two scuba divers unfortunately made the entanglement worse,” Jacob said.
“We remind the public that, for their own safety and the safety of all involved, it is dangerous to approach or try to release whales trapped in nets.
“Our teams are the trained experts and we urge members of the public to please stay away from the nets.”
The mother and calf were among nine whale entanglements in nine days, part of a devastating spate of incidents involving humpbacks as they migrate south after the breeding season, according to the Envoy Foundation, a conservation group that was on the scene on Saturday with a drone to document the situation.
The Envoy Foundation’s co-founder Andre Borell said the entanglements were “unconscionable”, particularly after a recent report by KPMG into shark control measures recommended the Queensland government trial removing shark nets during whale migration season from April to October.
“The science doesn’t support that these devices work, so let’s stop pretending that this is about the environment and let’s start admitting that this is about politics,” Borell said.
The Queensland government said earlier this year it would pour more money into its shark control management plan between 2025 and 2029 to put “swimmer safety first”.
Borell said any entanglement, even if it has a “fairytale ending” with the animals being freed, can be extremely stressful for the whales.
“When you consider the scale of their annual migration from Antarctica all the way up here, to have their babies, nurse their calves and then go all the way back … every ounce of energy is important,” he said. “And these entanglements obviously burn a lot of that energy, they create a lot of that stress.”
There are 27 shark nets in Queensland and 51 in New South Wales.
The NSW state government had planned to trial a removal of some shark nets from three beaches in Sydney and Central Coast, but it paused that plan earlier this month after a fatal shark incident on Sydney’s northern beaches.
Whale mothers and their calves are particularly vulnerable to shark netting as they spend larger amounts of time near the shore as they head south, risking entanglement. Dr Vanessa Pirotta, a whale scientist, told Guardian Australia earlier this month during a separate entanglement that adults appear to be aware of the danger the nets pose.
“But the calves obviously don’t know and get entangled,” she said. “Then the mums freak out and stay nearby, then they are getting entangled as well.”
In more bad news for marine life, a report released by South Australia’s environment department this week found the deaths of three great white sharks were linked to the state’s ongoing algal bloom.
Scientists conducted necropsies on the carcasses of nine white sharks found dead on the state’s beaches. The results showed three of those sharks had physical symptoms, including inflamed gills, consistent with a cause of death related to exposure to high levels of the algae Karenia spp.
Mike Steer, the executive director of the South Australian Research and Development Institute, said many creatures affected by the bloom were “suffocating”.
“The algae effectively impact the gills and prevent the animal from breathing appropriately,” Steer told a news briefing on the shark deaths on Friday.
“The other thing that the bloom can do is, once it decomposes in an area, it can draw the oxygen out of the water as well. So it creates additional pressure for those marine organisms that rely on gill respiration to breathe appropriately … they effectively get suffocated.”
