There’s a whale of a problem off the West Coast of the U.S. Gray whales are in the midst of a “catastrophic mortality event,” said the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), with close to 150 carcasses found on beaches along the Pacific Ocean just this year. The loss is largely due to human-caused climate change, and action is needed to protect the species.
Blood in the water
Gray whales are under stress due to “multiple threats, including ship strikes and reduced food sources,” said PEER in a statement. Between 2019 and 2023, their population declined almost 30% from 20,500 to 14,526.
The statistics are even worse between 2025 and 2026. An estimated 2,500 to 8,000 whales died during that time frame. “Determining an exact number is difficult because marine biologists can only count the whales that are stranded,” said The Guardian. The ones that “wash ashore are only maybe 10% of the whales that are dying,” said Rick Steiner, a marine ecologist in Alaska and the chair of PEER’s board of directors, to KTOO.
Because of climate change, the marine animals are “starving” as “Arctic sea ice decline is reducing their Arctic seabed prey resource,” said Steiner in the PEER statement. The West Coast population travels approximately 10,000 miles between Baja California, Mexico, and its feeding grounds in the Arctic, where the whales “feed on crustaceans called amphipods,” said Smithsonian magazine. Climate change is reducing the amphipod population, so “some hungry whales are detouring into dangerous places like San Francisco Bay, where they are being fatally struck by ships or becoming entangled in fishing gear.”
Gray whales were once protected under the Endangered Species Act because of commercial overfishing but were removed from the protection list in 1994 after populations recovered. So it may be necessary to “relist them on the Endangered Species Act” and “provide the management tools that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) needs” to “give these guys the best chance of making it through this climate bottleneck,” said Steiner to KTOO.
Where to next
Along with anthropogenic climate change, other human actions are threatening gray whale populations. Reducing emissions is necessary to protect the whales and other species, but “shorter-term threats to these whales must also be reduced, including ship strikes, oil spills, entanglement in fishing gear, harmful algal blooms, microplastic pollution, ocean noise, disturbance, and the harvest in Russia,” said Steiner in the PEER statement.
NOAA has yet to relist the gray whale under the Endangered Species Act or take action to protect the species. Individual states, however, have enacted protective policies.
California has “ship-speed reduction zones in areas known to have higher gray whale concentrations,” and, though voluntary, “many ships do reduce their speed,” and some ships have people assigned to look out for whales, said The Guardian. Other states are advocating for similar measures. “The loss of thousands of whales in just two years,” said Steiner in the statement, “should be of concern to us all.”