The 45- to 50-foot female humpback, estimated to weigh 50 tons, was on the humpbacks’ usual migratory route between the Northern California coast and Baja California when [she] became entangled in the nylon ropes that link crab pots.

Team members realized the only way to save the endangered leviathan was to dive into the water and cut the ropes.

[Diver James] Moskito said about 20 crab-pot ropes, which are 240 feet long with weights every 60 feet, were wrapped around the animal. Rope was wrapped at least four times around the tail, the back and the left front flipper, and there was a line in the whale’s mouth. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blowhole out of the water.

Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration.

When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles, according to the rescuers. Moskito said it swam to each diver, nuzzled him and then swam to the next one.

This is actually a few years old, but I recently came across it on Facebook and started digging, expecting to find it was a fabrication. As it turned out, while the photo going around on Facebook is bogus – it’s actually not even of a whale, but a shark – the rest of the story appears to be true, and a fantastic account.

And to head off any of the inevitable arguments against anthropomorphizing (and I am not even going to get into how much I despise the way that word is used to try to preserve some special snowflakeness for humanity as if we weren’t as much a part of the natural animal world as, oh, I don’t know, a cetacean with a 4600 pound brain), I will merely note a couple of studies about cetacean intelligence projections and leave the rest to your own curiosity.

Via SF Gate.