A baby harbour seal was rescued from a life-threatening gillnet that was wrapped around her neck in West Vancouver.<\/p>\n
The seal was spotted by a passerby, prompting a call to the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue Society, which gave her the fitting name \u201cAnnette.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Lindsaye Akhurst, the society\u2019s senior manager, the net had likely been around her neck for three or four weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn that time, it did dig quite deeply down,\u201d Akhurst said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were concerned that maybe it dug deep enough to affect her anatomy\u2026 but thankfully that\u2019s not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Annette is around seven months old but severely underweight for her age, suggesting she was unable to eat during the weeks she was entangled in the gillnet.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the first few days, we had to slightly encourage her to get some nutrition into her body,\u201d Akhurst said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut now she\u2019s in a pool and eating fish all by herself.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rescue society says Annette\u2019s story is nowhere near a one-off; the group responds to hundreds of marine mammal emergencies each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not always fishing gear,\u201d Akhurst said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes it\u2019s packing bands or anything that these animals can get on them in some sort of way. Prevention is always the key in these cases, and we are here if it\u2019s not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for when Annette can safely return to the Pacific, Akhurst says she\u2019ll continue to receive treatment for a few weeks while her wound heals and she puts on enough weight to survive on her own.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was very lucky to have been hauled out when she did,\u201d said Akhurst.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very lucky the members of the public called us, and we were able to get there really quickly. Not all of them get that chance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A baby harbour seal was rescued from a life-threatening gillnet that was wrapped around her neck in West…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-444505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444505","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=444505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}