Whale dragged 650 feet of rope and 11 buoys — until rescue off Australia, photos show

A humpback whale entangled in nearly one ton of fishing gear was recently rescued off the coast of Australia, officials said.

The adult whale may have dragged the gear — which included roughly 650 feet of rope and 11 buoys — “all the way from Antarctica ,” according to a June 29 news release from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA).

It was first spotted by helicopter June 23 near Loch Sport, a tourist town in Victoria.

But it wasn’t seen again until June 28, when it turned up several miles to the north, near the town of Lakes Entrance, officials said.

At that point, DEECA put together a team to execute a “delicate” rescue operation.

The team began by attaching a telemetry buoy — which allows for location tracking — to the whale on June 28.

The next day, it tracked the animal and found the whale about 15 miles off the coast, where team members started a “difficult disentanglement operation.”

“The whale was so tightly tangled in the ropes,” James Dalton, an official with Victoria’s water police, told The Guardian. “We knew it was in real distress .”

By the afternoon, the majority of the buoys and ropes had been removed, though a small amount of rope was unable to be detached.

The disconnected gear, which weighed about 1,700 pounds , seems to have originated from an international vessel, according to Australia’s ABC News.

The whale may have become tangled off Antarctica — over 1,000 miles away — where the species feed during the summer.

“Humpbacks migrate up to 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) each year from the rich feeding grounds near Antarctica to the warmer waters of northern Australia where they calve and mate,” officials said.

Entanglements in fishing gear can cause fatigue, difficulty eating , limited reproductive success, injury and death, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Upwards of 300,000 dolphins and whales die every year because of entanglements with fishing gear, according to the International Whaling Commission.

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