The grey whales are dying in large quantities again.
At least 70 whales died in a shallow, sheltered lagoon on the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico, where animals gather for calves, nurses and breeding, said Stephen Swaltz, a marine scientist who has been studying grey whales since 1977. Swartz said.
This is the lowest number of home country pairs ever observed in the lagoon. According to the annual report From the Mexican Gray Whale Research, an international team of researchers co-founded by Swartz, who have been observing grey whales at Lagunathan Ignacio since the late 1970s.
The whale is currently heading north. Three grey whales have died in San Francisco Bay in the past two weeks. One of them was described as thin and malnourished by veterinarians and pathologists at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. Evaluations for the other two deaths are still being made.
Alisa Shulmanjaniger, who has led the Los Angeles chapter of the American temporary society Gray Whale Census in Rancho Palos Verdes since 1979, said she and her volunteer numbers were the lowest in the number of whales swimming south this spring.
“We didn’t see one southbound calf that’s never happened in 40 years,” she said.
Schulman Janiger and other researchers don’t know why the whales are dying, but she and others believe that it is due to a lack of food based on the depleted conditions in which some of the whales were found.
North Pacific grey whales cruise the Pacific coastline every year as they travel 6,000 miles north from the Baja Peninsula to summer feeding sites in the Arctic and subpolar regions. There, Leviathan is soaked in small crustaceans and amphipods that live in the muddy deposits of the seas of Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort, before returning to Roll, Cablat and Mingle into the light waters of Mexico.
Animals navigate some of the world’s heaviest cargo ship’s traffic, pilot them through discarded fishing lines and gear, manipulate killer whale pods waiting to tear defensive calves, and travel through gauntlets of danger to swim in water contaminated with microplastics, toxic chemicals and toxic algae.
Most of them make the journey well.
However, in 2019, many whales began to die..
From that spring, biologists at the Lagunathan Ignacioli Search Station recorded about 80 dead whales in Mexican waters and just 41 mother-child pairs in the lagoon. They also noticed that about a quarter of the animals were “skinny” using photographs and drone images.
“You can see that in the photos,” Schulman Janiger said. Schulman Janiger described the skinny whale as it appears to have a neck because the thick fat pad that normally covers the area behind the skull is gone. “And you can see their shoulder blades,” she said, referring to the animal’s shoulder blades.
“You shouldn’t look at a whale’s scapula,” she said.
Then, in 2019, hungry whales moved north, leading to a large number of numbers starting to appear on beaches in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. By the end of that year, researchers had documented 216 dead whales on a beach near the coast of the Pacific coast of the North American coast.
Federal investigation by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as an unexplained death event It was released in 2019. This study allowed scientists from multiple disciplines and institutions to gather and share knowledge to determine the cause of death.
The cause of death was not clearly established, and in 2023 the investigation was closed as the number of strands fell to what was considered normal. Many researchers We concluded that changes in Arctic and subpolar food availability are drivers (via large-scale changes in climate). Their ratings were supported by Observing whales’ malnutrition and skin observations, and similar events and observations of other Arctic animals, including birds, seals, crabs, and fish..
They also noticed a lot Whales were starting to feed in the area – San Francisco Bay, etc. And the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – places that have never been seen before.
Over the past two weeks, several gray whales have been observed in the San Francisco Bay. Feeding behaviors were also reported, including Pacifica City.
When asked whether NOAA researchers were paying attention to these regarding their observations and predicting the likelihood of another death, agency spokesman Michael Milstein said there are still few strands along the Pacific coast. The average annual average is about 35.
He said the whales’ northbound journey was too early to know for certain.
John Carambokidis, a senior research biologist and co-founder of Cascadia Research Collective, a Marine Mammal Research Center based in Olympia, Washington, agreed to Milstein.
And despite Schulman Janiger’s concerns, she said it was early – and La Niña’s ocean condition may partly blame the small number of animals observed so far.
She said she saw many gray whales migrating southerly than usual, swimming in the Gulf of California off the coast of Loreto, Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta, according to reports from Mexico.
She said that if there’s a low count because the whales were just behind, that’s good news. But if the already food-stressed whales have to tackle another 800 miles on their journey, it’s bothering you.
“It’s a very strange year for a gray whale, and it’s a year of concern given its physical condition, its strands and very low calves,” she said.
This story originally appeared Los Angeles Times.
