Explore Research at the University of Florida: Mike Walsh, a Clinical Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine, explains that in the wild, right whales can pick up hundreds of feet of fishing line, which will fill their mouths, and they will starve to death over time. Right whales avoid human contact, so removing the line is difficult. UF applied their methods of anesthetizing dolphins to the whales, and have been successful in removing line from the whales’ mouths. Less