A team from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources was documenting the second North Atlantic right whale calf of the season about four miles offshore of the Florida/Georgia border on Wednesday when they received an urgent message.

“We had just started a biopsy,” Jessica Thompson, senior wildlife biologist, told The Current GA . “We were literally recovering the bolt (of tissue sample) that was floating in the water when the call came in on the radio about the entanglement a number of miles off the north end of Cumberland. So we just pivoted and started heading that way.”

An aerial survey team out of Florida had spotted the distressed whale while conducting the first field day of this right whale calving season, which runs from December through March. With fewer than 400 individual

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