God’s Creation in Crisis: Gray Whale Deaths Along the Pacific Point to a Deeper Wound

Among the most majestic works of God's hand, the gray whale — a creature that endured Ice Ages and was carried through the brink of extinction by whaling — is now washing ashore dead in numbers scientists have never before recorded. And the cause points back to the warming climate. 

A population in freefall

The eastern North Pacific gray whale population has fallen from roughly 27,000 animals in 2016 to about 13,000 last year — a decline of more than half in less than a decade. This year alone, 145 gray whales have already been found dead on beaches, including 13 in Alaska, and last year 179 whales were found stranded. Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine conservation professor who has spent decades advocating for these animals, cautioned that the visible losses are only a fraction of the true toll. 

"There is a high mortality rate, and of course, the ones that wash ashore are only maybe 10% of the whales that are dying," Steiner said.

The most sobering number may be the collapse in calf births. Annual births have plunged from about 1,600 to just 85 over the same seven-year period. That is not a fluctuation. It is a near-total failure of new life within a single generation — a sobering echo of how quickly fragile ecosystems, like fragile families, can unravel when their basic provisions are stripped away.

Why the gray whales are starving

Gray whales make one of the longest journeys of any mammal on Earth — up to 14,000 miles round trip between the warm birthing lagoons off Mexico's Baja Peninsula and the cold Arctic feeding grounds where they spend the summer gorging on tiny seafloor crustaceans. John Calambokidis, a senior research biologist who co-founded the Cascadia Research Collective and has studied these whales for 40 years, put the crisis plainly: 

"The population is in serious trouble, and this is not part of a normal cycle," he said. "What is so alarming is that desperate animals are dying at a really high rate and not having calves."

Scientists trace the root cause to a warming Arctic. As sea ice melts earlier each spring, the algae that grows beneath it — and that ultimately feeds the shrimp-like crustaceans gray whales depend on — is disappearing. Weakened by hunger, many whales also become disoriented, wander into shipping lanes, and are struck by boats — a second, human-caused wound layered on top of a changing climate.

Steiner filed a petition last August asking NOAA to relist gray whales under the Endangered Species Act, which would restore stronger legal protections and require federal agencies to ensure their actions do not further harm the species or its habitat. Typically the agency responds within 90 days. It has now been nearly a year, and Steiner has said that if NOAA does not act soon, the matter will likely head to court. Meanwhile, Michael Milstein, a NOAA Fisheries spokesperson, has said the agency is still evaluating the petition without a firm timeline.

A conservation success story now at risk

What makes this decline especially painful is that gray whales were once held up as one of the great success stories of environmental stewardship. Hunted to near-extinction for lamp oil in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the species had been protected by international agreements. Mexico turned key breeding lagoons into protected refuges. By the 1990s the population had rebounded to more than 20,000 animals, and gray whales were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1994.

Researchers with the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility describe the current wave of strandings as a "Catastrophic Mortality Event," noting that this year's pace of deaths already exceeds totals recorded during the last federally declared crisis between 2019 and 2023.

What families and communities can do

Caring for creation is a calling entrusted to each of us, and it rarely begins with grand gestures. More often it takes root in small, faithful acts — in the everyday decisions we make about energy use, in prayers lifted up for the scientists and policymakers who have power to make changes, and in teaching our children that every living thing, from the sparrow to the great whale, bears the fingerprint of its Creator. To care for these creatures is to honor the One who made them and called them good.