Pacific gray whales facing ‘catastrophic’ die-off as climate crisis hits food supply

View of a gray whale breaching in the Pacific Ocean near Los Cabos, Baja California state, Mexico, in 2024. Photograph: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen View of a gray whale breaching in the Pacific Ocean near Los Cabos, Baja California state, Mexico, in 2024. Photograph: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images Pacific gray whales facing ‘catastrophic’ die-off as climate crisis hits food supply Trump administration urged to relist a species in ‘very, very serious trouble’ under Endangered Species Act Climate change is driving a gray whale “catastrophic mortality event” in the Pacific Ocean as melting sea ice depletes food sources and the animals starve, environmental groups warn . Meanwhile, a range of other issues, like ship strikes, oil spills, microplastic pollution, algal blooms and Russian harvesting are also probably contributing to the die-off that has nearly halved the whales’ estimated population. It fell from 20,000 in 2019 to fewer than 13,000 this year, and the deaths appear to be accelerating. Environmental groups have petitioned the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to relist the gray whale under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which would alleviate some problems, but its approval is a long shot as the Trump administration moves to gut wildlife protections . The whales are in “very, very serious trouble”, said Rick Steiner, an Alaska marine ecologist and chair of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility’s (Peer’s) board of directors. “The stranding numbers last year and this year are enormous compared to their annual average,” Steiner said. “Stranding” is the term for whales that wash up onshore. The gray whales, which travel from Baja California to Alaska to feed each year, came close to extinction in the 1970s, but rebounded following robust conservation efforts. They were delisted from the ESA in 1994, which Steiner called a “colossal mistake”. The estimates are most dire for 2026 – somewhere between 2,500-8,000 whales are estimated to have died so far this year, which meets the criteria for a “catastrophic mortality event”. Determining an exact number is difficult because marine biologists can only count the whales that are stranded. The average annual number of gray whale strandings from 2006 to 2023 was 43, but rose to 179 in 2025. Through the first half of this year, 146 whale carcasses have been directly counted. Scientific literature estimates the ratio between unobserved, or sunk, mortalities offshore and observed mortalities onshore for gray whales is between 7-to-1 and 25-to-1. The whales that wash up are emaciated, Steiner said, and the scientific consensus is that they are starving due to a loss of access to food sources that is driven by the dramatic reduction in sea ice around Alaska due to climate change. While the whales have been resilient in the past, evidence points to a dire situation, said David Weller, a Noaa marine biologist, in an agency release. “The envi