WASHINGTON — Three gray whales have been found dead in Washington over the last week.
The situation is “unusual,” according to experts who monitor the population.
First, a juvenile gray whale was spotted in the north fork of the Willapa River, according to the Cascadia Research Collective (CRC). The whale was thin, but did not appear to have any injuries.
CRC went out on the river on April 2 and wasn’t able to get the whale out. A few days later, the whale was found deceased.
On April 4, crews examined two deceased gray whales that were found washed ashore in Ocean Shores. Both were malnourished. One had head trauma, which appeared consistent with a ship strike.
Stephanie Raymond, the programs director of the Orca Network, told KIRO 7 the gray whale population is believed to be struggling with finding food.
“What we think is happening is that as the water in the Arctic gets warmer, this is really impacting their food supply,” Raymond said. “So they’re having a harder and harder time finding food.”
Raymond says the organization is seeing more whales come into Puget Sound in poor body condition.
The whales need to bulk up before their migration to Baja, California, as they typically do not feed during the entire migration. Raymond says some of the Sounders Gray Whales, a small group of gray whales, are diverting from their normal migration. Some, she said, are skipping their migration altogether.
“We did have the calf counts in Baja in the breeding grounds have been just devastatingly low for the last several years,” she said. “So that’s a place that we can be looking to see if there’s recovery happening for the gray whales.”
Raymond said the gray whale population peaked in 2016. Since then, she says, we’ve been seeing fluctuations, but reports that NOAA estimates we have now lost more than 50% of the population.
“The one glimmer of hope I would offer is that we have seen these fluctuations happen in the past, where they get better,” she said. “The question is, why is this one not seeming to get better?”
Solutions to solve the problems associated with the warming ocean water are complex, she said, but we can focus on protecting the whales’ food supply and shorelines.
The gray whales that come into Puget Sound feed on ghost shrimp in the intertidal.
Making sure vessels are aware of the whales is important, too, especially because gray whales do not have dorsal fins and often move much more slowly than other species, making them harder to spot in the water.