Seal with fishing net caught around its neck in Cornwall freed after two months

A seal that had become entangled in a net has been freed by a rescue team in Cornwall.

The British Divers Marine Life Rescue Team (BDMLR) found an adult grey female seal known as 'Nanette' with a monofilament cutting into her neck.

The BDMLR team said the net was "cutting so deeply into her neck that the wound had healed over the top of it around most of her neck, enclosing it within her body".

A spokesperson for the team added: "This made disentangling her far more difficult as the knots of the net could not be pulled through cleanly."

The team in Cornwall and colleagues at the Seal Research Trust have been looking out for Nanette to try to cut her free since she was sighted in December 2024.

They made two attempts to rescue the seal which failed due to "disturbance from people on the clifftop ignoring barriers" which scared off the seals.

Their third attempt, on 31 January, finally proved successful. Five rescuers and a vet used a cargo net and a specialist stretcher to catch Nanette and keep her still, allowing them to cut the net out of her neck.

As the cut was so complex, the team had to figure out a system of cutting knots in a specific order to "release the strands, which could then be carefully extracted and fully free her so that she could be released again".

Volunteers at the charity have thanked the surveyors at the Seal Research Trust and the BDMLR team itself for working in a "challenging scenario" to give Nanette "a better quality of life, net-free".