/ In the News

Gray Whales Are Dying Along The Pacific Coast. The Warming Arctic May Be To Blame.

By Daniel Wolfe, CNN

A mud plume behind a gray whale.
Amy Willoughby, CICOES/NOAA/NMFS/AFSC/MLL Permit No. 20465
A mud plume from a gray whale feeding.

You could hear the gray whales breathing at night. Unlike the rattle of cicadas and the toads croaking in unison, the puffs of air breaking the ocean’s surface were something Matthew Van Daele had never heard before.

A biologist for the Sun’Aq Tribe of Kodiak, born and raised in Alaska, Van Daele camped out in the summer of 2019 along the Pasagshak Point, a few minutes’ walk from the shore. Gray whales gather at this place along the Kodiak archipelago to feed and prepare for their winter migration from Alaska to Mexico.

“You could see them clearly through the day, just like the stories of the old New Bedford whalers who would see all the smokestacks (of water) from the sperm whales. And the bay was just thick with gray whales and humpbacks. As the sun went down, you could still hear them breathing,” said Van Daele.

Last summer, after a season scarred by whale strandings and deaths, there was only silence, said Van Daele.

Since 2019, an international group of scientists, field biologists and volunteers have been investigating a mysterious phenomenon known as an Unusual Mortality Event, or UME, that’s been killing off one the world’s heartiest survivors: the northern Pacific gray whale. In that time, the number of stranded gray whales has reached 500 — a fraction of the many thousands that likely died and sank to the ocean floor.

While its underlying cause remains elusive, many researchers point to the conditions in and around a rapidly changing Arctic Ocean. The retreating ice sheet, warming waters and a shifting ecosystem may be decimating gray whales. Understanding these threats to the whales could reveal an even broader ecological impact — and another piece of Earth’s biome rewritten by climate change.

Continue reading at CNN