Short Wave - We saved gray whales from extinction. Why are so many dying again?

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

In 1999 hundreds of gray whales washed up along the west coast of North America. More in 2000. They lost an estimated 25% of their population. But then the whale population recovered and people moved on. Until it happened again in 2019. And 2020, and 2021. It’s still happening today. Host Regina G. Barber dives into this mystery with marine ecologist Joshua Stewart, who explains how scientists like himself solved it – and the tough questions that came up along the way. Check out our Sea Camp series and our limited run Sea Camp newsletter, featuring deep dives into research, cute critters and games!Interested in more ocean mysteries? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Consider the gray whale. Humans killed around 3 million whales in a period of like 70 years or so. In some species like the gray whale, certain populations drop to just 5% of their historic numbers. And we stopped hunting them pretty much because we'd killed so many of them that it was no longer economically viable to keep hunting them. That's Joshua Stewart. a marine ecologist at Oregon State University. And he says along the way, the public took notice

after a biologist and conservationist named Roger Payne put whale songs on a vinyl record. And folks said, wow, how could we possibly be killing these animals? We have to stop this. So that was in the 70s. That was sort of the birth of the modern conservation movement. In the 1980s, the international moratorium on whaling went into effect, and numbers started to climb.

all the way through 1994, when numbers rebounded so much that the gray whale was officially removed from the endangered species list. But then 1999 happened. And then hundreds of whales start washing up dead on beaches all along the west coast of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The same thing happens the next year in 2000. Hundreds more wash up dead. And these are just the whales that people see dead on the beach. It doesn't include the ones that die at sea during their more than 10,000 mile round-trip migration to the Arctic. This is where they eat enough to last them the entire year. So Josh says, scientists estimated thousands of whales died, accounting for about a quarter of the population.

Everybody's wondering what caused this. We thought they were doing so well. Has something changed? Are they on their way back down? But then, the death stopped. The whale population recovered. Years went by and people moved on until a few years ago. 20 years later, 2019, hundreds of gray whales start washing up dead again.

And it's still happening today. Today on the show, a mass whale death mystery. How scientists figured it out and what it means for the species moving forward. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shorewave. The Science Podcast from NPR. Okay, Josh, let's pick up this story. So we're in 2019, all of the whales are dying off again. Then what happens?

Yeah, so when you have hundreds of whales wash up dead on a beach, people take notice. We have federal laws that are meant to protect and recover marine mammal populations. And so the government jumps into action in response to that. and they get these teams together of experts to try to understand what is driving these mortality events. And so I was part of that effort. What did you find? So we looked at this and basically what we found was that after the population had recovered to that sort of pre-whaling abundance or that caring capacity, they're going through these cycles of booms and busts where it actually didn't just happen these two times in 1999 and then again in 2019.

We found another major decline that happened 10 years before that in the 80s. Oh, wow. And so you can have, in this population alone, 20 to 30 percent of the population die off in two, three, four years. And then in the past, it's turned around and recovered. And that, to me, is almost the more extraordinary part that you can have this population recover that 20 or 30 percent also over a period of three to four years. It takes a little bit longer for them to recover than to die off.

And so we're seeing these booms and busts, which you expect to see in short-lived, you know, small critters that reproduce really quickly. It's not something that we expected to see in animals. These old whales. They live for, you know, 70 years. They're enormous. They take a really long time to reach sexual maturity, take a long time to reproduce. Those aren't really the patterns that you expect to see in an animal like that. And a lot of people when they see that, they think,

well, disease. You know, maybe this is a disease component that spreads and suddenly has a really strong impact and then maybe goes dormant for a while and comes back after a while. So there was a lot of emphasis looking for disease as a potential driver as well. Okay, so you're looking into this mystery, you find these cycles of boom and busts happening. And then a few years after these most recent mass die-offs, you get an email from a colleague. What does she say? Yeah, so she, this is my colleague, Jackie Grebe Meyer, she's an Arctic scientist, and she studies the little critters, the crustaceans, that live in the seafloor. And this is what gray whales migrate all those thousands of kilometers to feed on every year. And it's the only time they're eating, like you were saying. Yeah, exactly.

So that whole, all of their energy for the entire year depends on how many of these little critters they can eat in that tiny window of, you know, three to five months in the summer. And so she's been going up to the Arctic on these cruises, collecting benthic grabs. They send a little claw down, and it takes a sample of the mud, and then they count everything in it. They weigh everything in it. So a claw machine? It looks like a claw machine. That's the prize is plankton?

Well, yeah, a bunch of dirt is your prize. So she's been, you know, studying these critters and these ecosystems for decades. And so she sends me the data on how much benthic biomass, how much weight or average weight of these little crustaceans there are in the sediment. And I just roughly plot the data. And the cycle that these little benthic crustaceans are showing perfectly aligns with these gray whale booms and busts. You never see that kind of like perfect alignment in your data.

Wow. And, you know, on one sense, it's like magical because it's one of the coolest experiences you can have as a scientist. You don't have to even use any fancy statistics, although I love using fancy statistics, you can just see in the raw data that these two things line up perfectly. So in that sense, it was super cool.

On the other hand, it's so simple and obvious that the food that they migrate all this way to go feed on is what's driving their population dynamics. Of course it is. There's no surprise there. And so the surprise is not necessarily the drivers, which is how much food they have to eat and how long they have to access that food up in the Arctic.

the surprise is how dramatic the response to that prey limitation can be. Because, again, you just don't expect to see that kind of response in a species like this. So this sounds like a natural cycle. Is that right? Absolutely, yeah. So this is the interesting thing and where the story continues because we're seeing this for the first time in gray whales. But that was exactly my next question, which is, well, is there anything surprising about this? or is this exactly what we would expect to see? And what's unique about gray whales in a sense is just how well they've recovered. So they were one of the first whale populations or species to recover back to those levels

that they were at before whaling. And so that is probably what triggered these events. And sort of our subsequent work that we've been doing is showing that actually once you get to carrying capacity and you've run out of food and you're competing for, furiously with all of your, well, they used to be your friends, but now they're your competitors, you're much more sensitive to those fluctuations in the environment. So if there's enough food for 25,000 whales, and sometimes there's enough food for only 18,000 whales, if there are only 2,000 of you, you don't care.

There's plenty of food up there. But once you're at that level, then those fluctuations start to matter. And so we only see these big booms and busts so far in these populations that have recovered up to those levels where they're really competing with each other for limited resources. So if this is a natural cycle, should humans do anything about this when they start seeing whales just dying? I know. It's so, that's a good question. So the deeply unsatisfying part is that there's really probably nothing that we can do about these natural cycles. So once we find that, hey, this is driven by prey availability in the environment, there's not much more that we can do.

about that. Now, that doesn't mean that when hundreds of whales wash up dead, we should just say, ah, no big deal. You know, it's probably natural. We still come back. Yeah, they'll come back. They came back before. We definitely still want to confirm, you know, what is driving that die-off because there are many other things that could be driving it. We as humans are increasing our footprint in the oceans. We fish more. We ship more things. We have tons. Well, and that plankton cycle may be affected by climate change? Yeah, uh-huh. That's a huge potential disruption. You know, we're moving out of a natural range of sort of variability and prey availability into this sort of new altered world where one of the biggest changes that we expect is just an overall reduction in the amount of plankton

that's available on average. And so certainly we're seeing, I think that's what's happening in this most recent gray whale decline. It's much longer than previous boom. How long is it? So this one has been going on pretty much nonstop since 2019. And the mortality rates have dropped off a little bit. Fewer whales are dying, but their birth rates have remained like rock bottom. So the population is not recovering the way that it did in previous years. And we're pretty sure that that is being driven by climate impacts to their Arctic feeding areas. So what are the larger lessons you think people should take away from this like whale mystery that you had a part in solving? Yeah. So there's a, it's sort of a paradox, which is that there are these populations that are doing extremely well.

And so they've made these amazing recoveries. And we sort of thought we don't have to worry about them anymore. But those are exactly the populations because they've reached this point where they're competing with each other, that we're going to see these big responses to changes in the environment, natural variability in the environment, but especially climate impacts. Those are all going to show up first in these populations that we didn't think we needed to worry about anymore. And the sort of, like we said, the unsatisfying thing is that there's not necessarily something we can do about that, except, you know, stop climate change. That would be great. But we haven't been very good at doing that yet. So it's going to be really hard, I think, for the public, for managers, for

scientists to deal with this when, you know, we've been saying for years, look at these amazing successful recoveries. And then it's those populations where it's like, well, what the heck? Why are hundreds of these whales washing up dead? And how do you say to the public at that point, oh, don't worry about it. There's nothing we can do. It's going to be tough. But they're kind of like the canary and the coal mine for like climate change. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that. what we're seeing right now with gray whales is a climate alarm bell because they're integrating what's happening in those ecosystems. It's easier for us to study what's going on with the gray whale

population as they all migrate past us in California. It's much harder to have sort of a holistic assessment of what's happening in those really far-flung Arctic ecosystems. But yeah, we're getting that signal from gray whales that things are fundamentally changing. They're changing fast. And they're really being disrupted by these climate impacts. Josh, thank you so much for coming on Shortwave to talk to us about whales. My pleasure. I love whales. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps our show.

To hear more ocean science, check out our Sea Camp series. And it's a company newsletter equipped with ocean critter picks, deep dives into research and puzzles. We'll add links to our show notes. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.