A juvenile humpback whale nicknamed Tutu is swimming freely again after a multi-day mission to disentangle it from more than 150 metres of fishing gear off Vancouver Island.<\/p>\n
Paul Cottrell, a marine mammal coordinator with the federal Fisheries Department, says the rescue team received several reports from the public about the 4-1\/2-year-old whale towing a fishing buoy near Texada Island in the northern Salish Sea on Sept. 4.<\/p>\n
Cottrell says the department\u2019s rescue team and the Cetus Research and Conservation Society spent three days freeing the whale from the fishing gear, in an operation the department documented in a social-media video.<\/p>\n
He says the first day of the operation rid Tutu of most of the gear before the whale was tracked with a satellite tag to locate him the next day.<\/p>\n
Cottrell says Tutu was finally freed on Sept. 6, suffering a few abrasions on the flukes, which did not appear to be life-threatening.<\/p>\n
He says anyone who sees a whale in distress should report it immediately to the department\u2019s 24-hour marine mammal incident hotline.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A juvenile humpback whale nicknamed Tutu is swimming freely again after a multi-day mission to disentangle it from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-141014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}