Meet the Women Rescuing Whales in California
A Monterey nonprofit’s "whale ambulance" helps entangled whales

Researchers aboard Marine Life Studies' research vessel, the Current'Sea, observe a male orca in Monterey Bay, California. | Photos courtesy of Marine Life Studies
Peggy Stap spots a whale as soon as we leave the harbor. Its distinctive white plume of a spout shoots straight into the air, perfectly framed by a bright-blue sky and a calm, equally blue ocean. Stap has seen the animal thousands of times, and this whale, a humpback, is one of the most common in her home waters of Monterey Bay in California. But to her, the experience never gets any less special.
“Humpback whales are my greatest love,” she says. “They changed my whole life.”
Stap is the founder and executive director of Marine Life Studies (MLS), a nonprofit research organization aiming to further research and education about marine mammals. She, along with MLS operations manager Stephanie Marcos and two college students earning community service credit, headed out on a sunny day in early December to collect data on the local marine life. Stap’s vessel, the Current’Sea, is no ordinary boat. With a box of helmets, life vests, a drone, underwater cameras, and tracking buoys, the Current’Sea serves as a whale disentanglement ambulance, the first of its kind. Stap is the cofounder of the whale entanglement team (WET), a mostly volunteer-based group dedicated to saving whales in Monterey.
According to Matt Merrifield, chief technology officer at the Nature Conservancy of California, whale entanglements are on the rise. NOAA released data from 2024 documenting 34 confirmed entangled whales off the West Coast, the highest number since 2018. A heartbreaking video released in August of 2024 showed a humpback whale off the coast of Washington swimming without its iconic fluke fins, which likely fell off due to an entanglement in fishing line or gear.
Entanglements like these are becoming more common because of climate change, Merrifield explains. Unexpected heat causes the fish and invertebrates that whales prey on to die or move to different parts of the ocean, bringing the whales into closer competition with fishermen and into places where old fishing gear might have been left behind. Dragging heavy gear can make it difficult for whales to breathe, travel, dive, and hunt for food, and can cause starvation, suffocation, and amputations like the one documented in the video. According to the International Whaling Commission, entanglements account for as many as 300,000 whale and dolphin deaths annually.
“Whales are incredibly old, majestic animals that we share this world with,” Merrifield says. “We have a moral obligation to do right by them.”
There are people across the globe who aim to do just that by freeing whales from entanglements. “They’re like EMTs for whales,” Merrifield explains. Unlike whale scientists and researchers, these “whale EMTs” don’t necessarily have any background in marine science or conservation, and don’t need to have a degree. Instead, these individuals get certified through NOAA Fisheries’ Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, which can take years.
“Anyone can do it,” says Karen Grimmer, a resource protection coordinator at NOAA’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. “But it takes a lot of work: it’s something that people really have to want, if they’re going to do it.”
Stap is one of the few people who has put in that hard work for decades. Whales weren’t her first passion, or even her second. The first time she saw a whale, she was 41 years old. Her father had passed away that year, and to celebrate his life, she, her mother, and her stepfather hopped on a whale watching boat in Maui, Hawai'i. “A humpback whale and her calf swam past our viewing window, and I cried,” she says.

She found herself handing out her resume around Maui, hoping to get a job in whale research. After a chance meeting with a woman who turned out to be the treasurer for a humpback whale research organization, Stap began moving up the ranks on Maui. With the help of her mentors, Stap founded Marine Life Studies in 2009.
After Stap moved to Monterey full time, she got a call from a local fisherman that there was an entangled whale in the nearby Carmel Bay. Stap immediately went to the location, but neither she nor the other locals who assisted had the tools to do the job right, and she was one of only two people who had any training at all. “I thought, this is dumb. We need trained people,” she says.
At that point, there was only one man in Southern California who was training people to rescue whales. So Stap decided to take matters into her own hands. She started a training program, set up a hotline for locals to call if they spot an entangled whale, raised money for the program through grants and donations, and acquired the Current’Sea, converting it into the whale ambulance it is now. Marcos estimates that MLS has trained upwards of 60 rescue volunteers, and Stap and Marcos have worked up to being Level 3 responders.
Disentangling a whale is no easy feat and requires a lot of planning, skill, and pure luck. How the whale is entangled is a huge factor in the success rate of its disentanglement, explains Stap. If the entangled gear has a long trailing end, it’s easier for rescuers to attach a buoy, which keeps the whale from diving before rescuers cut it free. It also allows for responders to more easily attach telemetry tags, which track the whales’ location in the event the rescue has to be postponed. Without a trailing end, buoys and telemetry tags can’t be attached, meaning that the whale could disappear at any moment and be impossible to find later.
Even if prospects seem promising, factors like weather conditions, time of day, and the availability of highly certified responders could make or break the rescue. If the water is too choppy or wind and precipitation are too strong, rescues may have to be postponed. Moreover, if no one with the right level of certification is able to respond on short notice, the team has to wait until they get approved by NOAA, or until someone with the right certificate comes along. By that point, it might be too dark, or the whale might have taken a dive and popped up somewhere it can’t be found.
Merrifield and his technology team at the Nature Conservancy have been working closely with Stap and Marcos to develop new technologies that could increase the success of the rescues. Their current project is to improve the telemetry tags, lowering the time between location readings from three to four hours to 10 minutes. Merrifield says that Stap and Marcos have been instrumental in its success, offering the use of the Current’Sea during testing and providing their feedback. “Peggy has been so enthusiastic about this because she’s seen the need,” he explains. “Marine Life Studies gets as much of the credit for developing this as we do.”
It hasn’t always been easy for Stap and Marcos to find their way in the whale rescue field, which is largely dominated by men. Both women say that they have encountered difficulties with getting certified and working in whale rescue, difficulties which they say their male counterparts didn’t have. Many of Marine Life Studies volunteers, most of whom are women, have also experienced similar difficulties, Stap says.
But for them, it’s all been worth it. “Hopefully when we fight against male-dominated stuff, it makes it easier for the generations ahead,” Marcos says. After Stap and Marcos received their Level 3 certifications, they worked with NOAA to set up a regular schedule for trainings and certifications rather than having them scheduled case by case, which gives everyone an equal shot at getting the experience they need.
Stap and Marcos pour a huge amount of their time into research and education, with Marcos helming the education side. For Stap, this is a nonnegotiable part of the work. She got into this field because of people who helped her, she explains, who allowed her to go from being a landscaper in Michigan to one of the leading authorities on whale rescue. “I want to give people the same opportunities I had,” she says.
Last year, Stap and Marcos purchased an office in Moss Landing, right next to research giants like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Moss Landing Marine Labs. It’s the first time Marine Life Studies has expanded beyond the bounds of Peggy’s house, which is where she and Marcos have been working out of since the nonprofit's founding. They are in the process of converting most of it into a learning center for kids; an enormous whale skull in the corner of the room is the first sign of what’s to come.
“I hope when kids see us, see this center, they’ll get the idea that maybe they can be a scientist, or a whale rescuer,” Stap says. “That would give me great hope for the future.”