We’re still really struggling to try to understand what is going on with this population,” Moore says. And determining what’s killing them is essential, not only for the whales, but also for surveying the health of the ocean

he notes. “It’s been very spotty, and there are dead whales, but it’s not the continuous elevated mortality that we saw in 2000.” Because of the lack of continuity in the deaths, Gulland agrees with the others that what’s killing gray whales is multifaceted, with climate change acting as an accomplice. “I think the mistake is to be looking for just one thing,” she says.

“When you really start getting into the ecology, and the nutritional value of different types of prey that we know these animals eat, the story gets a little bit more complex than, ‘There’s a lot of whales [and] they’re all starving, because they’ve eaten their way through their food supply,’” Moore says.

Another line of research I’d like to see . . . is what is the relative caloric value of those . . . amphipods, which we know store a lot of lipid, versus something like a krill or a mysid, which is another type of invertebrate but not as lipid rich,” Moore says

Moore explains, that sea ice pattern has been very different, with “the extreme surprise of winter sea ice really being absent in 2018 and 2019.”

“Polar seas are warming twice as fast as in other places, and we know that that is changing aspects of the ecosystem,” says Moore.

“We’ve had cases where the blubber layer is still thick, but we’ll cut, and we can see it’s dry and fibrousy.” He says it’s “like all the oil and material has been . . . sucked out of it.”

“How thick the blubber is and, more importantly . . . the level of oil and lipids in the blubber and some internal body cavities tell you about the health of the animal,” Calambokidis says.

Moore agrees that warming temperatures and melting sea ice in the Arctic have to be considered. “The reason I have a little problem with [the argument that] all these whales are starving because they’ve hit this hard carrying capacity,” she says, “is that gray whales are very adept at eating a lot of different things.”

Calambokidis notes, it’s too soon to close the case on the recent gray whale deaths. That’s because the carrying capacity argument doesn’t address some key unknowns about the food supply, such as whether the whales’ diet is changing due to “the dramatic changes that are occurring in the Arctic environment,” he says.

“That was pretty eye-popping,” Moore says. “That’s a big population of gray whales.”

Recent aerial surveys did not show an uptick in orca numbers, however, and “there have always been killer whales up in that region,” explains Moore, who says there’s no strong evidence that orca numbers have gone up significantly. As a result, she and others reason, it’s unlikely that orcas are solely to blame for the recent spate of gray whale deaths.

We’re still really struggling to try to understand what is going on with this population.

“not be enough for a pregnant female to bring a calf to term,” Moore says

In addition to possibly helping to save the whales, says biologist John Calambokidis, one of the founders of the nonprofit Cascadia Research Collective where Huggins works, understanding their deaths could be an “incredibly key indicator of . . . changing conditions in our whole global environment.”

“Something’s clearly going on,” says Sue Moore, an ecologist at the University of Washington who has studied gray whales for decades. “You’ve got a big uptick in the number of animals that we’re seeing dead on the beach.”

Bluish-tinged tongue lolling out, the gray whale lay in near silence on the sand of Long Beach, Washington.

“Something’s clearly going on,” says Sue Moore, an ecologist at the University of Washington who has studied gray whales for decades. “You’ve got a big uptick in the number of animals that we’re seeing dead on the beach.”

great oceanographers

They are our ocean sentinels.

like all the oil and material has been . . . sucked out of it.

rhythmic whap, whap, whap of small waves lapping its belly punctuated the silence

snacking stations

n oily, rotten odor surrounded the behemoth,

Bluish-tinged tongue lolling out, the gray whale lay in near silence on the sand of Long Beach, Washington. The rhythmic whap, whap, whap of small waves lapping its belly punctuated the silence. An oily, rotten odor surrounded the behemoth, which tipped the scales at 2,200 kilograms, the equivalent of four heavy-duty SUVs.