NOAA Fisheries
North Pacific Gray Whale Research and Conservation
Forty years and Counting
Life for the Eastern North Pacific gray whale begins
in the warm lagoons of Baja, Mexico.
Born into a lifetime of continual migration,
they will undertake one of the longest
journeys of any mammal on the planet
traveling some nine to thirteen thousand
miles annually -
a survival strategy that has
evolved over thirty million years.
Part One: Born to Migrate
The whales leave the lagoons of Baja and
begin their journey north to the Arctic summer
feeding grounds in February,
segregating into groups according to age and sex,
with nursing female leaving last and only when
their calves are strong enough for the journey.
The migration northbound is lead by the
newly pregnant females, again a mix of adults
and juveniles behind that, then cows and calves
migrate separately and they migrate
in a different corridor –
they're right up against the coast
almost in the surfline.
The shallow, coastal migratory corridor
offers the calves a safer passage seldom
frequented by their primary predator...
the killer whale.
[imagery of killer whale attack on gray whale]
Every year NOAA scientists monitor the
Eastern population during its northbound
migration from the Piedras Blancas
observation station, off central California.
[ Blow. It's the same female. ]
The purpose of the research is to monitor
reproduction in the Eastern North Pacific
gray whale population.
[ This is good. Good surfacing. ]
Counting the northbound cows and calves,
scientists are able to estimate the total
number of calves born that season
into the Eastern North Pacific population.
That basically gives us an idea of how well
the population is doing - is it growing,
is it stable, is it declining?
After about 4 months,
the whales reach their summer feeding grounds -
the food-rich Arctic waters of Chukchi,
Beaufort and the northwest Bering Sea.
Gray whales are bottom feeders
so they dive down to the bottom and
take a big scoop of mud - Arctic mud -
and in that mud is their favorite food,
the little tiny crustaceans -
they're called amphipods.
An adult can eat up to twenty-five hundred pounds
of these crustaceans in one day.
But a gray whale's milk is about fifty to
fifty-five percent milk fat
and those calves are feeding on that milk fat.
They consume about fifty gallons a day,
putting on a lot of weight anywhere
from fifty to sixty pounds a day.
As fall arrives, and ice begins to form
in the Arctic, the whales begin their migration south.
The southbound migration is lead by
near-term pregnant females,
so these are the females that are going to calve this year.
They're followed by a mix of adults and juveniles
with primarily yearlings and young juveniles
making up the tail of the migration.
In order to monitor the overall number of whales migrating south,
a team of NOAA scientists observe and count
the whales from a field station in Granite Canyon, California.
Science has been really important in the
conservation and management of all
whale populations because that's essentially
how we learn about these animals,
how we understand what they're doing,
what their threats are,
how they're responding to those threats.
Although commercial whale hunting
is a thing of the past,
pollution,
ship-strikes,
predators and entanglement in commercial fishing gear,
as well as climate change are just some of
the daily obstacles that whales must continue
to navigate during their lifetime of migration.
Education is one of the most important
things we can do to protect any species
is to get knowledge and information
to people that are either coastal fishermen,
people that are conducting seismic surveys–
oil and gas developers,
to the navy – whoever it might be.
The more education,
the more data we can bring to them,
the better off the whales are going to be.
Watch Part 2
From the Brink of Extinction to Recovery
NOAA Fisheries
www.fisheries.noaa.gov
[ credit roll ]
[ gray whale sounds ]