Andreas_55

“A humpback whale off San Francisco got tangled in dozens of crab traps connected by about a mile of rope, with weights every sixty feet; the whole apparatus ran to well over a thousand pounds. Rope was wrapped at least four times around the whale’s tail, back, mouth, and left front flipper, cutting into the giant’s flesh. Though nearly fifty feet long and weighing about fifty tons, the whale was being pulled down and was having trouble breathing when divers got into the water to see whether they could help. The first diver was so aghast at the extent of the entanglement, he didn’t think they’d be able to free the whale. Further, he feared that the whale’s thrashing could entangle the divers, too. But instead of struggling to break away as soon as possible, the whale remained passive through an entire hour while the divers worked. “When I was cutting the line going through the mouth,” James Moskito said, “its eye was there winking at me, watching me. It was an epic moment of my life.” When the whale realized it was free, it did not swim away. Instead it swam to the closest diver, nuzzled him, then swam to the next one. “It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun,”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel