According to scientists at the Cascadia Research Collective, gray whale populations off the Washington coast are experiencing a higher level of early-season mortality than they’ve ever recorded. Just this year, three gray whales have been found off the Oregon Coast, and 14 have been found off the coast of Washington.
The whales that have been found stranded in Washington and Oregon appear to have been extremely malnourished. Scientists think that melting sea ice due to climate change in the arctic is reducing the whales’ food supply, leading to the uptick in whale deaths recorded along the entire West Coast.
John Calambokidis is a senior research biologist and a co-founder of the Cascadia Research Collective who has been studying gray whales for over 50 years. He’s one of the first to dispatch when a gray whale washes up on the coast of Washington. Calambokidis joins us to discuss these trends and what it means for gray whale populations in our region.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Scientists at the Cascadia Research Collective have never seen so many gray whales off the Washington Coast dying this early in the year. So far this year, 14 have been found off the coast of Washington and three more off the Oregon Coast.
John Calambokidis has been studying gray whales for over 50 years. He’s a co-founder and senior research biologist at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
John Calambokidis: Yeah, nice to talk to you.
Miller: So I mentioned this number, more than a dozen gray whales have been found dead along the Washington Coast, more off the Oregon Coast, since the beginning of 2026. How different is that from a recent year?
Calambokidis: Well, we’ve been in a period of elevated mortality, starting in 2019 – the start of what NOAA declared an unusual mortality event. And we have had higher totals than we are at right now, but the troubling thing about the number we’re at is how early they’ve come and then what a rapid rate they’ve been coming. It’s also very troubling that this is now six [to] seven years into this mortality event. While we’ve seen some of these events in the past, they’ve usually been short term and the whales have bounced back. Instead, we’re seeing this continued number of mortalities, with some other really troubling signs as well.
Miller: I want to hear more about those broader issues you’re talking about, but to just hear a little bit about the specifics here, you’re one of the people that responds to a whale stranding or a whale being found washed up on the shore. What happens when you arrive? What are you doing?
Calambokidis: We’re part of the Pacific Northwest Marine Mammal Stranding Network. It’s managed and authorized by NOAA and there are different participants in different areas: Portland State University, Oregon State University in Oregon. So we usually get notified from a number of different sources that there’s a whale washing up. It might be through NOAA or report directly to us or from the Coast Guard.
Our initial focus is some really basic information – what species is it, how big is it, what age class, what sex? And then depending on the condition of the animal … And we also have to start bringing in considerations like, how public is this, what are going to be the disposal issues in terms of what we can do with the whale? But our hope that the whale is fresh enough to collect both external and internal tissues that can be looked at in more detail later and tell us important things, like contaminants and amount of lipids. Also look for signs of things like ship strike, entanglement, other major causes of death like that that are human related. If we can go deeper, we can look at stomach contents. Was this whale feeding or not? Any indications from the different organs of any pathologies? So you kind of have a level we can go down.
Right now, our examination team is pretty heavily taxed because these strandings have been coming at a rate of one every day or every other day for the last couple of weeks.
Miller: Have any patterns emerged in terms of what these whales look like or what it seems has happened to them?
Calambokidis: Yes, absolutely. Some of them are consistent with past years and I’d say the consistent feature is [that] a lot of the whales are really malnourished. That’s been a pattern going back through this mortality event and even some of the previous ones. And that can be a little bit tricky just because these are whales, right now, that are northbound, coming from their breeding areas in Mexico, headed back to their feeding areas. And their main feeding area is in the Arctic. They’ve typically gone through, even under normal times, a three to four month fast. So it’s usually when they’re normally in their worst body condition.
Some of these animals are in extremely poor body condition. We’ve had cases where, even though they have a blubber layer, we’ll test the blubber layer, and you think a blubber as being fat and oil, but there’ll be less than 5% lipids or oil in that blubber. It’ll mostly be just dry tissue or sometimes watery tissue without oil in it. So that’s one characteristic that’s common.
This year in particular, we’ve been seeing almost all of our animals as adult males. We don’t know if that will hold up. Kind of historically, there’s a slight male skew to the whales we tend to find dead, but nothing as dramatic as we’re seeing this year. We don’t know if that will hold up. On the adult class size, that makes a little bit of sense because one of the other pieces of information we’ve seen coming from the NOAA counts of the population, is that the number of calves born in recent years – and especially last year – was at the lowest level they had ever documented.
So part of the troubling part is there are just not a lot of juvenile animals in the population. And typically, historically, we’ve seen a significant component of these strandings being juvenile animals. We’re not seeing that this year.
Miller: How does whale behavior change when they are severely malnourished?
Calambokidis: Well, the big thing that we’re seeing is whales showing up in unusual areas. This was most dramatic with a whale that swam up a small river a couple of weeks ago, the Willapa River – a river we didn’t think a whale could swim up. And what we view is these are whales that are trying to explore and are maybe in a desperate search for feeding, and that could be because they’re running through their reserves that they’ve stored up.
So some of these whales that are starving, it’s really a reflection of how much food that they eat and nutrition that they get last year. If they’re running through those reserves, they’re in a maybe more desperate search for new areas or don’t even have the ability to swim back to their main feeding grounds in the Arctic. But we also see – and this is a little more tragic – a certain level of debilitation kick in and that’s why we think sometimes these whales end up in rivers or other areas. And some of these whales we’ve encountered at these later stages don’t seem like they’re entirely there.
Miller: These are the whales that humans can easily see. They’re washing up on shore or they’re going weirdly up a river. But do you have a sense for the mortality level that’s not visible, where whales would just be dying in the open ocean?
Calambokidis: That is a great question. I’m really glad you asked me that because we think that’s a much bigger portion of the mortality than the portion we see. And especially with these emaciated whales, where they don’t have much oil or fat, they are actually negatively buoyant. So when they...
Miller: Meaning, they sink?
Calambokidis: They will sink. And if they sink in shallow enough water, there might be bloating that will occur later that might bring them up. But they either stay on the bottom, sometimes this is referred to … You’ve maybe seen stories about whale falls where in certain areas, you can find these carcasses on the bottom. That ends up feeding a whole benthic community. It ends up living around these decomposing whales on the bottom.
We think it might be 70%, 80% of the mortality goes undiscovered that way. That seems to match. There are these annual censuses of the gray whale population and this is one other piece of the puzzle that are done in California by NOAA. And those are what are used to estimate the overall gray whale population. In the last 10 years, those have shown a decline from a high of 27,000, down to their most recent estimate last year of 13,000. So that’s to less than half in less than 10 years, and that’s a really precipitous decline.
If you look at the overall pattern of these population estimates, they do seem to drop during these periods of elevated mortalities. But whereas we might be discovering hundreds of animals on shore, the population estimate drops by thousands – matching that point that you were asking about that the majority of the mortalities actually go undocumented.
Miller: I want to hear more about that in just a second, but you mentioned earlier questions about disposal. Famously, in Oregon, in Florence in 1970, officials used dynamite to theoretically dispose of a whale carcass that washed up on shore. Chunks of blubber rained down. It’s become a kind of part of kooky Oregon lore. But if we’re talking about higher-than-ever numbers earlier in the season of whales on shore, how do you manage disposal if they’re coming every couple of days?
Calambokidis: I think that is posing a major challenge, and especially there are some of these whales that come into the Salish Sea and Puget Sound into much more populated areas. That becomes a bigger issue. So it sort of has to be figured out individually.
The preferred and first method we like to look to is to allow the whale to decompose naturally. In more remote areas, that’s feasible and that’s the preferred option. The next most common option is to maybe use heavy equipment to drag it a little bit higher up the beach and bury it. So that’s an option. In areas that are really populated or not sandy areas, sometimes we look to tow them to a more remote location or even sink them with weights, so that they stay on the bottom.
Those are all the more common things. But there can be really unusual things and unusual places these whales end up, from up rivers to a whale that got stuck in a pier. Maybe I’ll tell one odd story...
Miller: Please.
Calambokidis: NOAA actually has a program where they sought coastal shoreline property owners, if they would want to volunteer their property to have a whale towed and decomposed on their beach. And we’ve actually had one whale do that. They have had a number of people step up and do this, and found it fascinating to watch over the few months that the whale would decompose on the beach. So there are actually some people that are fascinated by this.
Miller: What is a decomposing whale smell like?
Calambokidis: Well, I think those of us that work a lot with dead whales have maybe become a little more resistant. I’ll think a whale doesn’t smell that bad and it’s pretty fresh, and I’ll see other people not used to it
Miller: Not wanting to be around you. [Laughter]
Calambokidis: Yeah, gagging. So the reaction to it can be highly varied. My son who used to assist me in necropsies many years ago, he’s an older adult now. It was interesting. He loved helping with these necropsies and didn’t notice the smell. And then it was something like at 12 or 13 years old, while doing it, he stopped and he said, “wait a minute, this really stinks.” [Laughter] It had connected with some part of his brain. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” But not to make light of it, it can smell fairly bad, but there are ways to kind of mitigate that. It kind of gets worse initially, but then it gets better over time.
Miller: Well, to go back to the really serious piece here, you mentioned a more than 50% drop in overall estimated gray whale populations off the Northern Pacific Coast in just a couple of decades. What are the leading theories for what’s behind this continuing population decline?
Calambokidis: This is maybe a good chance to contrast them to some of the other kinds of gray whale populations because that’s what really reveals what’s causing this one. For example, there’s a group of gray whales that feeds in the Pacific Northwest called the Pacific Coast feeding aggregation. So whale watching in the summer off of Depot Bay or Newport, often goes out to see these gray whales that are feeding, actually, in Oregon coastal waters. Those represent a small portion of the population; just about 250 whales do that. And that group does not seem to be experiencing this big die-off and these big vacillations.
There’s another group of gray whales that feeds called the Western gray whale population off the coast of Russia. It seems to be doing OK. So everything points the finger at the Arctic feeding grounds, which is where most of the overall population goes to feed. That’s the component of the population showing this high mortality. Unfortunately, it’s the biggest component.
For a while, we thought, OK, gray whales represented a success story. They had actually bounced back from just a few 1,000, up to over 20,000. And for a while, we thought this was a success story of a recovery of a whale population, but we knew they would probably hit a food-limited carrying capacity. And sure enough, starting in the 1990s, we started to see increased mortality. In one paper that we worked on together with a number of co-authors, these boom-bust cycles in gray whales indicated that maybe they had reached the limit of that food supply.
In the early years of this most recent mortality event, we thought, OK, maybe this just is another one of those cycles. But all those other events lasted just a year or two, after which the whales rebounded back to their original level. What’s troubling about this one is we’re not seeing that rebound. The decline is to lower levels than they’ve been in 50 years. And it’s clearly part of a larger trend.
The Arctic ecosystem where gray whales feed [and] part of that ecosystem used to be covered by ice. And the ice would retreat, was part of a dynamic system involving ice cover that has dramatically changed with global warming and climate change. So we have a pretty good idea that’s at the heart of this, but some of the finer mechanisms of how that’s causing that decline … There are elements of lower ice that actually have a short-term benefit to gray whales. They can access more areas, and we’ve seen them expand. They’re feeding areas in the Arctic with less ice. But it also seems to be really damaging the ecosystem and especially some of the benthic productivity that the gray whales rely on to feed on these small creatures on the bottom.
Miller: John Calambokidis, thanks very much.
Calambokidis: Great to talk to you.
Miller: John Calambokidis is a scientist, a co-founder of the Cascadia Research Collective. He has been studying gray whales for over 50 years.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
