In June 2025, NOAA published a follow-up nobody had planned on writing. Years after a rescue team freed a whale they feared wouldn't make it, a stranger's snapshot proved the story wasn't over after all.

A Whale Anchored in Place

In 2017, a young humpback whale turned up off the coast of Maui wrapped in cable so heavy it could barely reach the surface to breathe.

Ed Lyman, the Large Whale Entanglement Response coordinator for Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, was near the end of his 15th whale season and had already helped free two dozen whales. This one was different.

The whale was frantic and hard to approach, dragging itself through the water while anchored by the weight of the gear.

800 Feet of Cable

When the team finally got close enough to work, they found something they had never seen before.

"It was the first time we had ever seen a humpback whale entangled in cable," Lyman said.

Responders carefully cut away more than 800 feet of 5/8-inch coaxial cable, hauling it into their boats piece by piece. Some of it was wedged so deep in the whale's mouth that it could not be safely removed.

The team freed what they could and let the whale go, with no way of knowing whether it would survive.

A Photo That Changed Everything

Seven years passed with no confirmed sighting.

Then a member of the public uploaded a photo of a whale's tail, or fluke, to Happywhale.com, a public database that uses the unique markings on a whale's fluke the way investigators use fingerprints.

Researchers with the sanctuary compared the pattern to their old case files and got a match. It was the same whale, spotted again not far from where it had been freed years earlier.

A healthy humpback whale fluke (tail) breaking the surface, photographed by a member of the public and uploaded to Happywhale.com, the exact type of image NOAA researchers used to re-identify this whale seven years after its rescue — A photo like this one, uploaded to Happywhale.com, is what let researchers match this whale to its 2017 rescue.

What They Found

Now a full-grown adult, the whale showed no signs of injury, no remaining gear, and no visible wounds.

It had healed completely and was gliding through the same sanctuary waters where it had once fought just to breathe.

A Bigger Network Behind One Whale

The rescue was never a one-person job. Lyman and fellow coordinator Maria Harvey run Hawaii's Large Whale Entanglement Response Network, which now counts more than 350 trained members.

Since 2022 alone, the network has freed 44 large whales from life-threatening entanglements, pulling in more than 15,690 feet of rope and netting.

The 2024-2025 season was its busiest yet, with 17 on-water responses to seven different animals in just three months.

None of that would matter to any one whale if the story simply ended at the moment the last cable was cut. This one didn't. It survived.

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