NOAA surveys show one of the Pacific Ocean’s most well-known whale species is losing additional ground after an “unusual mortality event” from 2019 to 2023 sent the marine mammals into a population tailspin.
Two new technical memorandums from NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center estimate that eastern North Pacific gray whales currently number roughly 12,900 individuals, a more than 50 percent drop from 2016 when gray whales peaked at 27,000 individuals.
Gray whale populations crashed after 2018 due to what scientists attribute to food source disruption in the whales’ primary feeding grounds in the arctic and subarctic Pacific. The whales are known to store energy from their summer eating sprees in the Pacific’s northern waters before completing an annual 10,000- to 12,000-mile migration to breed and calve off the Baja Peninsula between January and March.
“These whales depend, over the course of their lives, on a complex marine environment that is highly dynamic, and we expect the population to be resilient to that over time,” David Weller, director of the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, said in a statement. “The environment may now be changing at a pace or in ways that is testing the time-honored ability of the population to rapidly rebound while it adjusts to a new ecological regime.”
