Entanglement in fishing gear routinely causes injuries and even mortalities in right whales.  As part of the disentanglement efforts, a series of drawings are prepared as scientists and managers decide how best to proceed, e.g., attempt disentanglement.  As entanglement events are almost never witnessed, a group of us decided to try develop a system that would allow us to ‘reverse engineer’ these entanglements in hopes that it would reveal how they happen.  Working closely with Laurens Howle of Duke’s Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department and Bellequant Engineering, we have created a mechanically-explicit ‘video game’.  In this program, we have a 3D model of a right whale swim into lines, and once it encounters the line the program calculates the forces (e.g., frictional, drag) acting on the whale as we control the whale’s swimming behavior in attempts to recreate entanglements.

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