Nearly 150 Gray Whales Have Been Found Dead Along North America’s Pacific Shore This Year, Prompting Scientists to Sound the Alarm
The population of eastern gray whales, which annually migrate along the West Coast between the Arctic and Mexico, has been declining in recent years. Conservationists say 2026 could be one of the deadliest years on record for the marine mammals
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Gray whales are in trouble.
So far this year, 145 of the massive marine mammals have washed up dead or got stuck and died along the West Coast of North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries.
This year’s deaths appear to be part of a concerning pattern, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit environmental advocacy group sounding the alarm about the latest NOAA Fisheries statistics. Last year, 179 gray whales were found dead. And between 2019 and 2023, the animals faced what federal officials deemed an “unusual mortality event,” marked by 690 strandings and decreased birth rates.
“The stranding numbers last year and this year are enormous compared to their annual average,” Rick Steiner, an independent marine ecologist who serves as chair of PEER’s board of directors, tells the Guardian’s Tom Perkins.
If the trend continues, conservationists are concerned that 2026 could be one of the deadliest years on record for the large baleen whales. They also suspect this year’s true death toll is much higher, since many carcasses sink at sea.
“The ones that wash ashore are only maybe 10 percent of the whales that are dying,” Steiner tells KTOO Alaska Public Media’s Alix Soliman.
Two populations of gray whales live in the North Pacific Ocean. One group primarily inhabits the waters near East Asia and Russia, while the other, known as the eastern population, lives along the West Coast of North America.
Every year, members of the eastern population make a roughly 10,000-mile roundtrip journey between the Arctic, where they feed on crustaceans called amphipods, and the waters off Baja California, Mexico, where they give birth and raise their calves. The voyage is one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal, according to NOAA Fisheries.
But climate change is making it harder for the whales to find enough food, and many are starving. The eastern population has declined to its lowest number since the 1970s—about 13,000 individuals in 2025, down from the 27,000 individuals estimated in 2016.
“All of them are thin. Some are extremely emaciated,” John Calambokidis, a biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit Cascadia Research Collective, tells Spectrum News 1 SoCal’s Maryssa Rillo, adding that he feels something “catastrophic” happening with the animals.
Did you know? Mud trails
Gray whales feed by swimming slowly and rolling on their sides on the sea floor, making long trails in the mud as they go. They suck up sediment, then use the coarse baleen plates on both sides of their upper jaw to filter amphipods into their mouths.
Because of the climate change-driven decline of amphipods, researchers think some hungry whales are detouring into dangerous places like San Francisco Bay, where they’re being fatally struck by ships or becoming entangled in fishing gear.
“It’s almost a deadly maze that they have to make it through,” Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, tells KABC-TV’s Tony Cabrera and Shayla Girardin.
Moving forward, conservationists are optimistic that gray whales may be able to survive by shifting their diet. They’ve been spotted in growing numbers in coastal waters near Kodiak and Sitka, Alaska, where scientists think they might be searching for new food sources. It’s possible they could be “switching from the benthic little bugs—the amphipods that live in the seabed sediment—to small fishes like Arctic cod up in the water column,” Steiner tells KTOO.
Gray whales have rebounded from crises in the past. They were hunted to the brink of extinction during the heyday of commercial whaling but, following the still-in-place global moratorium, they recovered enough to be removed from the U.S. federal endangered species list in 1994. The species also bounced back after an unusual mortality event in 1999 and 2000. But this time, experts worry the creatures may not be able to adapt quickly enough.
“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,” David Weller, director of the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, said in a statement last year.
In the meantime, advocates are calling on the federal government to re-list gray whales under the Endangered Species Act.
“Right now, [gray whales] are barometers of ocean health,” Bianca Perla, science director of the nonprofit Vashon Nature Center in Washington, tells the Seattle Times’ Aspen Anderson. “They’re telling us something’s going wrong because they’re not being able to be supported at the level that they should.”
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