One wrong move could be fatal: the divers risking their lives to save whales from ‘ghost nets’

Abandoned fishing equipment haunts our oceans, killing coral, turtles, sharks and whales. But in Colombia’s Gulf of Tribugá, ‘guardians’ are on call to free entangled marine animals

After a day of scuba diving, Luis Antonio “Toño” Lloreda was exhausted. Then a friend brought urgent news. “Toño, man, there’s a whale caught in a net out there.” Lloreda, 43, had freed other, smaller wildlife from fishing nets but this would be his first marine animal of such size.

The four to five metres-long juvenile humpback, accompanied by its mother, had a net studded with hooks wrapped around its fin and mouth. One wrong move could have been fatal for Lloreda or the whale.

Luis Antonio ‘Toño’ Lloreda holds a photo of the whale he freed from a fishing net

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