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CNN Live At Daybreak

Scientists Give Up Efforts to Rescue Right Whale

Aired June 28, 2001 - 07:23   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: A team of marine scientists say they are giving up now trying to rescue that rare whale off the Massachusetts coast. The injured northern right whale is now about a 100 miles off of Cape Cod and is beyond the range of rescuers.

CNN's Bill Delaney reports now from Provincetown, Massachusetts.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In the end, it proved so much easier for a rare right whale to entangle itself in a strand of man's world meant than for a man to untangle it, as efforts to sedate the whale and remove fishing line infecting its upper jaw failed.

DR. TERI ROWLES, NOAA VETERINARIAN: We got two shots in -- or two sedative doses in. Unfortunately, the drug did not have any affect on this animal, so we'll go back and look again at the drug doses and the types of drugs that we might use in the future.

DELANEY: The attempt to remove the three-quarter inch line surgically at sea described as like trying to operate with a scalpel on the end of a pole on a running patient.

(on camera): For all the efforts to save this right whale, the 320 to 340 left remain as endangered as most any creature on Earth. Right whales reproduce just once every three or four years. And so far this year, at least 10 percent of calves born have already been killed.

(voice-over): The vast majority: victims of ships, though here, from a whale dead a few years ago, note the line stuck in the baleen, through which whales sift the plankton they feed on. In the right whale, now believed to be 100 miles off Cape Cod, scientists were able to cut line trailing like a mustache from the rope in the wound. But prospects are not good.

TERI FRADY, NOAA FISHERIES: It's like if you had a string around your finger and it was clipped here and this would be able to come out of the wound. But it's already a very serious and involved would, so even this may not be enough. But they certainly don't believe he's going to live with it in there.

DELANEY: The whale, known scientifically as number 1,102, now likely to migrate toward Canada, where scientists there could try to help it if it lives long enough.

Bill Delaney, CNN, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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