A juvenile humpback whale was spotted caught in two sets of commercial crab gear southwest of Humboldt Bay on June 7. Its whereabouts are currently unknown by rescuers. In response, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife will close the local commercial Dungeness crab season June 20.
CDFW law enforcement officers spotted the whale tangled in commercial Dungeness crab gear around 11 a.m. last Saturday with “several wraps of crab line around its tail.” The tangle included a buoy near the humpback’s tail and another buoy being dragged and submerged 50 yards behind the whale.
Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency that coordinates responses to entanglements, said the whale could not move much. “It was swimming, but moving very slowly, mostly at the surface,” said Milstein. He described the entanglement as serious, as it would affect the whale’s ability to find food and swim.
CDFW departed to pick up a telemetry buoy to track the whale and coordinate a plan to free it from the gear, but the humpback was nowhere to be found when a CDFW vessel later returned to the area, as visibility worsened, said Milstein. Crews activated by the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network responded.
Searches the following day continued to bring no sightings of the whale. The response included NOAA Fisheries, CDFW, Cal Poly Humboldt, the Marine Mammal Center, Cascadia Research Collective and the Coast Guard.
“We’ve shared this with the rest of the stranding network up and down the coast, so hopefully somebody else will see the whale again at some point,” said Milstein, though he noted finding entangled whales again is a common problem for rescuers.
He said boaters who sight an entangled whale should report it to the Stranding Network and stay a safe distance away. The entanglement reporting hotline is 1-877-SOS-WHAL.
Humpback whales can make a 3,000-mile trip in 28 days — and the entanglements can be fatal.
CDFW announced Friday the closure of the remainder of the Northern California commercial crab season in zones 1 and 2, which includes Humboldt County, effective June 20 at 6 p.m. because of the recent whale entanglement.
CDFW confirmed via photographs that the fishing gear involved had a California Dungeness crab buoy tag attached, according to a June 10 risk assessment for whale safety.
“CDFW is currently working with NMFS staff to review documentation and contact the owners of the fishing gear,” the document said.
The risk assessment’s recommendation was for the CDFW director to implement a season closure for the commercial fishery. The agency did so on Friday “to further reduce the risk of entanglement in crab fishing gear,” according to the CDFW news release.
According to NOAA, 2024 had the highest number of confirmed entanglement reports on the West Coast since 2018, totaling 36. Humpback whales were the most common species entangled, with 31 separate entanglements confirmed in 2024. Entanglements of humpbacks on the west Coast doubled from 2023. The whales are protected by the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Whale advocates say efforts to reduce entanglements aren’t going far enough.
In a prepared statement, Ben Grundy, oceans campaigner from the Center for Biological Diversity, asked, “How many more humpback whales have to be entangled in crab gear and die agonizing deaths before the state says enough is enough?”
“If California keeps allowing crab fishing when humpbacks are feeding just off the coast, it all but guarantees that more whales will be injured and killed. It’s reprehensible to keep subjecting humpbacks to entanglements when we have safe alternatives like pop-up gear. The state should’ve closed the fishery to vertical lines months ago,” he said, in a statement sent by a spokesperson.
In a news release, ocean conservation organization Oceana and environmental advocacy organization Natural Resources Defense Council called on CDFW to create a shorter, fixed winter season for conventional crabbing gear to protect whales.
“This unfortunate news of another humpback whale entangled in Dungeness crab gear dispels the narrative that whales don’t get entangled off Northern California,” said Caitlynn Birch, Oceana campaign manager and marine scientist in a prepared statement.
Sage Alexander can be reached at 707-441-0504.
Originally Published: June 13, 2025 at 2:24 PM PDT
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