Gray whales are starving, stranding, and vanishing at a pace that’s leaving scientists struggling to explain what’s happening to one of the ocean’s great migrants.
This spring, emaciated gray whale carcasses — many bearing the blunt-force marks of boat collisions — have been washing up along Washington state’s coastline at a rate that’s alarming marine-mammal scientists. Twenty-two have been found so far: dead and dying on beaches, in harbors, and up narrow rivers.
These are not small animals. At 42 to 49 feet long — roughly the length of a school bus — and weighing about as much as six adult African elephants, gray whales are built for endurance. That creatures this formidable are stranding in such numbers has researchers asking urgent questions about what’s happening along one of the ocean’s longest migration routes.
A population in free fall
The numbers are stark. The eastern North Pacific gray whale population stood at roughly 27,000 animals in 2016. Last year, NOAA counts put that figure at approximately 13,000 — a decline of nearly 50 percent in under a decade. Over the same period, annual calf births collapsed from about 1,600 to just 85, a 95 percent reduction that researchers describe as unprecedented in the modern record of the species.
What makes this especially concerning is how long it’s been going on. Scientists have tracked gray whale population cycles for more than 60 years, and natural fluctuations have occurred before. This one is different.
“The population is in serious trouble, and this is not part of a normal cycle,” said John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist and co-founder of the Cascadia Research Collective, who has studied gray whales for four decades. “What is so alarming is that desperate animals are dying at a really high rate and not having calves.”
How the Arctic feeds — and now fails — gray whales
To understand the collapse, it helps to understand the diet. Gray whales are specialized bottom feeders, built to vacuum up small shrimp-like crustaceans buried in the sediments of the Bering and Chukchi seas. Each summer, they travel to these Arctic feeding grounds to accumulate the blubber reserves that will carry them through a six-to-eight-month fast during their southward migration.
The problem begins with sea ice. As climate change accelerates the early retreat of Arctic ice, the seasonal algae that grows beneath it — and sinks to the ocean floor when ice melts — is becoming far less abundant. That algae is the nutritional foundation of the entire food web gray whales depend on.
“The fattest and most nutritious of the shrimp-like crustaceans that the whales eat are no longer as fat,” said Joshua D. Stewart, an assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute and lead author of a 2023 paper in Science formally linking the gray whale decline to Arctic climate change. Warmer bottom waters and stronger currents compound the problem. “The prey base is extremely sensitive to the warming Arctic,” Stewart said, “and does not seem to be recovering.”
Starvation reshapes behavior — with deadly consequences
When whales can’t build sufficient fat reserves in the Arctic, consequences cascade through every aspect of their lives. Many are abandoning their 10,000-to-14,000-mile migration route — the longest of any mammal — and making detours into areas like Puget Sound in search of alternative food. A small group known as the Sounders has fed successfully in Puget Sound’s intertidal zones for decades, but starving animals attempting to join them find far less success.
Severe malnutrition also impairs the whales’ ability to protect themselves. “You have levels of debilitation that are affecting their sense of navigation, their ability to avoid ship strikes, and they are more likely to get tangled up in fishing nets,” Calambokidis said. That explains much of the blunt-force trauma visible on stranded carcasses this spring.
Some whales are forgoing the journey to Baja Peninsula breeding lagoons entirely — prioritizing survival over reproduction, which suppresses calf numbers even further. The 2025 stranding rate in Washington is already faster than any previously recorded year, even as the total population sits at a fraction of what it once was.
Science under pressure, data under strain
The data documenting this collapse comes largely from NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for monitoring marine mammal populations. Yet the scientists who gathered that data are increasingly constrained in how they can discuss it. Major staff reductions ordered by the Trump administration have hit NOAA hard, and researchers there are reportedly reluctant to speak publicly about the gray whale crisis — because doing so requires acknowledging its driver: climate change, which the current administration has dismissed.
A widening gap has opened between what the science shows and what federal institutions are willing to say. Stewart’s 2023 Science paper provides peer-reviewed grounding for the link between Arctic warming and the whale decline, but institutional silence around it adds urgency to an already serious situation.
What the next years could look like
Scientists see little reason for optimism in the near term. Arctic warming is continuing, prey quality shows no signs of recovery, and the near-total collapse of calf births means the population has almost no internal capacity to replenish itself. Even if conditions improved tomorrow, rebuilding a whale population takes generations.
The available conservation levers are limited: stronger protections along migration corridors to reduce ship-strike risk, reduced fishing-net entanglement hazards, sustained monitoring. None of those measures address the root cause.
What scientists will be watching most closely is whether calf counts show any recovery in coming seasons. Right now, those numbers suggest a population that has lost its ability to replace itself — and until Arctic prey conditions change, that’s unlikely to shift.