![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/BMRTVQDJI4BHQYZHJIW4DXPBCQ.jpg\")
This photo provided by Cascadia Research Collective shows a gray whale swimming in the Willapa River near Willapa Bay, Wash., Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (Cascadia Research Collective via AP) <\/p>\nThis photo provided by Cascadia Research Collective shows a gray whale swimming in the Willapa River near Willapa Bay, Wash., Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (Cascadia Research Collective via AP) <\/p>\n
RAYMOND, WASHINGTON \u2014 Doug Nussbaum is a retired logger whose morning rituals include a walk down to the bluff behind his house that overlooks a bend in the Willapa River.<\/p>\n
He is never quite sure just what he will spot \u2014 ducks, bald eagles and sometimes seals and sea lions pursuing salmon. On April 1, he heard a breeching sound, then was stunned to see a gray whale \u2014 some 35 feet in length \u2014 swimming in circles.<\/p>\n
This whale, skinny and malnourished, had gone catastrophically astray on a spring migration that, for most grays, starts in calving lagoons in Mexico and ends in summer feeding grounds off Alaska and northeast Russia.<\/p>\n
For some two hours, the whale held in the bend, about 12 river miles inland from a saltwater bay. As the tide shifted, the whale made a brief push downstream, then reversed course to swim even farther upstream, lingering several days before dying in a shallow, narrow stretch of the river strewn with woody debris.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know what turned him around. I think he knew he wasn\u2019t going to make it, and was looking for a place to die,\u201d Nussbaum said.<\/p>\n
This whale is one of more than 900 eastern North Pacific grays that have been found dead along the shorelines of Mexico, Canada and the United States since 2019. Malnourishment was often a factor. Many more perished at sea as the estimated population plummeted during the past seven years from a high of more than 27,000 whales in 2016<\/a> to less than 13,000 last year.<\/p>\n There also has been an implosion in gray whale births. Last year\u2019s estimated count was the lowest since federal surveys began back in 1994.<\/p>\n Some marine scientists first thought the gray whale population was undergoing a cyclical population downturn after a big expansion that had strained their food resources. But the whales have not bounced back, and these researchers now assign an important role in the whales\u2019 decline to 21st-century shifts in temperatures, currents and winter ice cover that have reduced their foraging success in the northern seas.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat has changed. The obvious answer is the climate,\u201d wrote Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor at Oregon State University\u2019s Marine Mammal Institute, in an October 2025 article<\/a> published in the Journal of Marine Science with four co-authors. \u201cThe Arctic is the most rapidly warming region on the planet \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n For grays, a favored food source is amphipods, a small crustacean that whales once found in huge abundance in the Chirikov Basin, a swath of the northern Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska. <\/p>\n Amphipods thickly carpeted much of the basin\u2019s sea floor. They clustered together in mud tubes that allowed them to filter feed on decaying bits of algae, which grows on the underside of sea ice then falls to the bottom.<\/p>\n In dives, a gray whale could suck up more than 2,000 pounds a day of the amphipods from these tubes with the aid of their baleen that filtered out sand. This protein-packed feed helped the whales build up the fat reserves they needed to power their marathon migrations back and forth to Mexican waters.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was this really rich area \u2014 the wheat field of the Arctic for them,\u201d said Jacqueline Grebmeier, a University of Maryland environmental scientist who has spent more than three decades researching marine life in the northern Bering Sea.<\/p>\n But in the 21st century, accelerated Arctic warming reduced winter ice. In some years, it changed the timing of the melt. All of that reduced the amount of algae that reached the seafloor to nourish the amphipods.<\/p>\n The survival of these Chirikov Basin crustaceans also was undermined by increased current flows of warmer waters from the northern Bering Sea into the Arctic. This swept away much of the silt that the amphipods needed to build their tube structures, according to Grebmeier.<\/p>\n By 2010, the amphipod population in the Chirikov Basin had collapsed to only 9% of the 1984 population, according to a master\u2019s thesis <\/a>by Brian Marx, a research colleague of Grebmeier who analyzed decades of northern Bering Sea survey records.<\/p>\n Many gray whales responded to the radical changes in the basin by pushing farther north<\/a> into the Arctic\u2019s Chukchi and Beaufort seas, which amid the Arctic warming had a greater inflow of nutrient rich waters that helped to support more sea life. These gray whales could find some amphipods but also had a more varied diet, which likely included krill, a free-swimming crustacean, according to Grebmeier and other marine researchers.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, in the aftermath of the Chirikov Basin amphipod bust documented by Marx, the gray whales initially appear to have thrived, expanding to record high levels in 2016. <\/p>\n But beginning in 2019, amid a severe marine heat wave that reached deep into northern waters, gray whales struggled to find enough food in the Arctic to fuel their long annual migration \u2014 even when they journeyed into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas.<\/p>\n Since then, biologists on coastal surveys and in Mexico birthing lagoons have tallied increases in skinny whales with misshapen \u201cpeanut\u201d heads that are marked by a severe loss of fat that leaves a concave depression behind their skulls.<\/p>\n \u201cThe common denominator is basically just not enough body fat, not enough oil in the fatty tissue that they live off \u2014 and they\u2019re just running out of steam,\u201d said Steve Swartz, a marine mammal scientist who has spent decades studying the gray whales in their Mexican calving grounds.<\/p>\n As of the end of May, 25 gray whales had washed ashore along Washington\u2019s waterways during the spring migration period. Most of these whales had poor body condition, including the Willapa River gray, according to Cascadia Research Collective, a Washington-based scientific organization authorized by federal fishery officials to conduct necropsies.<\/p>\n The gray whale carcasses are sometimes left to decompose. Three weeks after its death, the Willapa River gray remains were decaying along a river bank near a boat ramp.<\/p>\n Fifty miles to the northeast, in the resort community of Ocean Shores, Washington, city officials opted for a different approach to disposing of three dead grays that washed up on a prime stretch of beach. They hired an excavator crew to attach cables to the whales, then dragged the carcasses into nearby sand dunes and buried them in pits.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is specialized work. They charged us $1,500 per whale,\u201d said Scott Andersen, Ocean Shore\u2019s city administrator. <\/p>\n Hunting the grays<\/p>\n In the 19th and early 20th centuries, commercial whalers targeted grays largely for their oil, which was used in lamps and lubricants, as well as baleen that ended up in corsets, umbrellas and even buggy whips.<\/p>\n The hunts nearly wiped out the eastern North Pacific whale populations. By the 1930s, researchers estimate that just a few thousand, or fewer, remained. The risk of extinction prompted an international agreement to end commercial whaling. <\/p>\n These gray whales, in the decades that followed, staged a remarkable resurgence. By 1994, with their population estimated at more than 20,000, they were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species Act listing in one of the most notable marine conservation successes of the last century.<\/p>\n Under the regulation of the International Whaling Commission<\/a>, subsistence hunting of grays by the Russian Indigenous people of the Chukotka region has been allowed to continue.<\/p>\n During the past quarter-century, the Russians have averaged 125 whales landed each year, according to Russian reports to the commission.<\/p>\n I witnessed one of these hunts during a reporting trip<\/a> to Chukotka in 2000, when relations between the U.S. and Russia had improved enough to travel there via a brief charter flight from the Northwest Alaska town of Nome.<\/p>\n The Novoe Chaplino villagers were in dire straits, lacking many of the foodstuffs that had been delivered during the Soviet era. They were able to reclaim their subsistence roots with some assistance from Alaska Inupiat whalers who provided darting guns and projectiles.<\/p>\n The gray whales remain an important source of food for the coastal villages of Chukotka, according to Russian reports to the International Whaling Commission. But in recent years, as the gray whale population has tumbled, some U.S. scientists have expressed concerns about the impacts of whaling, along with other human activities, such as ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.<\/p>\n They include Swartz and his Mexican colleagues who study the whales in Laguna San Ignacio, a major calving area that provides warm waters shielded from orca predators that roam further north. In these lagoons, gray whales breed \u2014 and after a year\u2019s gestation \u2014 give birth to calves that drink a high-fat milk that enables them to triple their weight before joining in the spring, north-bound migration.<\/p>\n During the past decade, Swartz observed huge reductions in the number of gray whales giving birth, along with increases in the numbers of skinny whales as well as those that appear to be a reasonable weight but do not bear calves.<\/p>\n That stark trend is also evident in the broader calf count conducted by NOAA Fisheries biologists at Piedras Blancas Lighthouse Station in central California, where they track calves migrating north each spring. In 2025, NOAA estimated<\/a> there were just 85 calves \u2014 down nearly 95% from more than 1,500 estimated in 2015. This year, calf counts also are expected to be low.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s get real here,\u201d Swartz said. \u201cThe whales are having a really rough time.\u201d<\/p>\n Last August, Swartz, along with a Canadian and Mexican colleague, sent an open \u201cletter of concern<\/a>\u201d to the International Whaling Commission urging a review of gray whale biology and their management.<\/p>\n That letter got a cool response from Dennis Litovka, a Russian scientist who directs the Chukotka Arctic Scientific Center and serves on the whaling commission\u2019s scientific review committee. <\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t accept and cannot support such (an) idea,\u201d Litovka wrote in response to questions from this reporter about the letter of concern. <\/p>\n In his comments, Litovka wrote about the importance of gray whales to the Chukotka villagers and whalers with whom he had lived and worked \u201cshoulder to shoulder.\u201d He said that Russian scientists do not see dramatic changes in a Chukotka bay frequented by gray whales. As for quota reductions, they should be made \u201conly very exceptionally,\u201d and as a last resort if gray whale populations continue to decline, Litovka wrote. <\/p>\n Litovka serves on the whaling commission\u2019s science committee that in 2024 concluded that, despite the die off, the gray whale population can sustain the authorized hunt levels, currently a maximum of 840 whales over six years when a small number reserved for Washington\u2019s Makah Indians are included. The scientists met last May for a meeting that included a gray whale review. But the commission is not scheduled to revisit the gray whale subsistence quota<\/a> until 2030.<\/p>\n Foraging in the Pacific Northwest <\/p>\n For decades, whale researchers have reported that some gray whales may opt out of the long migration to the Arctic to feed in other locations. They include more than 200 whales that spend much of their time foraging off northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Southeast Alaska. <\/p>\n A much smaller group ventures deep into Puget Sound to spend part of the year pursuing ghost shrimp in shallow coastal waters that turn to mudflats during low tide.<\/p>\n \u201cWe call it a high-risk feeding strategy because they may be a mile away from safe water, and as the tide goes out, they\u2019ve got to get out before they get stranded,\u201d said John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist at Cascadia Research Collective.<\/p>\n Other gray whales that forage in Pacific Northwest waters have become skilled, versatile foragers. They filter feed on crab larvae and skim feed through kelp beds for mysids, a shrimp-like crustacean.<\/p>\n Amid the overall decline of the gray whale population, the numbers feeding in the Pacific Northwest have been stable. <\/p>\n \u201cThey have looked very good,\u201d Jeff Harris, a NOAA Fisheries biologist who surveyed large areas of Northwest coastal waters frequented by the grays.<\/p>\n Some gray whales that have long fed in the Arctic are also trying to feed along the West Coast to gain an energy boost for their migration. Since 2018, there has been an increase in whales venturing into San Francisco Bay, where they are at high risk of getting killed by vessels. In an article published in April in the Frontiers of Marine Science, researchers identified 114 whales that entered between 2018 and 2025 and found that 18 of them later died within the bay. <\/p>\n If conditions don\u2019t improve in the Arctic, more whales may opt to feed in the Pacific Northwest. But the Pacific ocean off Oregon and Washington has a narrow continental shelf that limits the prime foraging for grays, so it\u2019s not likely to provide enough food for a much larger gray whale population.<\/p>\n But another big climate event could soon make life more difficult for gray whales. As early as July, marine forecasters are expecting a powerful El Nino marked by weakening trade winds that would send warm Pacific waters to the West Coast and the Bering Sea.<\/p>\n El Ninos typically weaken, and sometimes curtail, nutrient-rich upwellings of cold water that are vital to the marine food chain that supports gray whales. This one, according to some models, could be one of the strongest on record. <\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s just going to shake up the whole ocean,\u201d said Harris, the NOAA biologist. \u201cA lot of species are going to be struggling.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FFLIKXYUMVHBHOTPTW7VDKYXEA.jpg\")
A gray whale pushes her calf to the surface in San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja, Mexico. (Carolyn Cole\/Los Angeles Times\/TNS) A fading food source off Alaska<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ILSDVRWR5TSOKGYIVOCH2IL754.jpg\")
This photo provided by Cascadia Research Collective shows a gray whale swimming in the Willapa River near Willapa Bay, Wash., Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (Cascadia Research Collective via AP) <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/I2SNP3ZY2BGBNP4KJG7OVHYQ2Q.jpg\")
In this May 24, 2019, photo, teachers and students from Northwest Montessori School in Seattle examine the carcass of a gray whale after it washed up on the coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, just north of Kalaloch Campground in Olympic National Park. (AP Photo\/Gene Johnson, File) <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/HJNNQX6D7FFF5PVJ2PCVPBR4EE.jpg\")
A gray whale swims into Los Angeles Harbor on February 23, 2021. It\u2019s not unusual for gray whales to stay in the harbor for a few weeks in February and March before migrating farther north toward Alaska. (Carolyn Cole\/Los Angeles Times\/TNS) <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/3LFKURAT6RBBXOW5UDPBY2H4T4.jpg\")
“Spy hopping” is a behavior exhibited by cetaceans, such as the gray whale above, and some sharks. (Carolyn Cole\/Los Angeles Times\/TNS) <\/p>\n