Starvation runs through this year's 187 gray whale carcasses from Mexico to Alaska

Gray whales feed by ploughing the seafloor, filtering shrimplike amphipods out of mouthfuls of sediment, and Scientific American ties that prey supply to Arctic sea ice and the algae growing beneath it ^[12]. That is the chain the starvation reading depends on: thinner ice, less algae dropping to the bottom, less food waiting at the northern end of a roughly 10,000-mile annual round trip between Mexico and the Arctic ^[11]. An adult can reach 49 feet and 90,000 pounds ^[18]. The amphipod biomass needed to keep a herd of them fed does not appear as a number in this account ^[20].

The population arithmetic is where the account strains. It gives roughly 20,000 animals by 1994, the year the eastern North Pacific population left the U.S. Endangered Species List, and some 27,000 by 2016 ^[6], then about 13,000 as of 2025 ^[7], a drop of about 52 percent from the 2016 figure ^[16]. It also quotes NOAA's Aimee Lang saying the estimate ticked up this year to about 18,000, with the trend still downward ^[14]. Take the reported 35 percent loss between 2020 and 2025 ^[3] and run it backwards: 13,000 divided by 0.65 gives a 2020 herd of 20,000, while 18,000 divided by 0.65 gives about 27,700 ^[17]. Both figures check out arithmetically, and that is exactly the problem. The two endpoints belong to different series, and nothing here says which survey each came from.

The stranding total has a comparable gap. It counts bodies that were found, and the account offers no prior-year total to compare it against and no estimate of what share of deaths are found at all ^[19]. A collapse of calving is the sharpest hypothesis available and the one this material supports least directly, because the evidence that would carry it is a count of calves, and no calf count appears ^[20]. John Calambokidis of the Cascadia Research Collective told the magazine the decline has become more alarming ^[13]. That is a judgment from someone who has watched the animals for decades rather than a measurement, and it fits either population figure.

What the evidence here earns is narrow. The whales recovered on this coast died thin ^[4], and the food that would have kept them heavy sits at the far end of their migration ^[11][12]. A necropsy on a whale beached in Oregon in April can establish that the animal starved ^[2], but the Arctic seafloor that would explain why lies beyond where any necropsy can follow ^[20].