Just two days after a young gray whale stunned southwest Washington by swimming about 20 miles up the Willapa River, two adult gray whales washed ashore dead Friday at Ocean Shores, about 20 miles north of where the juvenile entered the river through Willapa Bay. They came ashore along a stretch of beach north of the North Jetty and south of the Taurus Boulevard beach approach.
Both whales were starving, said John Calambokidis, a research biologist and founder of Cascadia Research Collective, an Olympia-based nonprofit that studies whale and dolphin populations. One was a male, the other a female. They were about 42 feet long and the male had significant trauma to the head consistent with a ship strike.
The timing of the deaths does not necessarily mean the three whales were traveling together, Cascadia said. Gray whales are generally solitary creatures and do not move in family groups, the research collective said on Facebook.
But taken together, the three dead whales offered a bleak snapshot of a population that is still struggling.
Gray whales in trouble
Gray whales have been suffering from a “really high mortality rate” since 2019, Calambokidis said, and their population is less than half of what it was 10 years ago. He called it a “crisis in the population.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracked an “unusual mortality event” among gray whales from 2018 to 2023, during which 690 gray whales became stranded in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Strandings peaked between 2018 and 2020, and investigators believe changes in the whales’ Arctic and sub-Arctic feeding grounds likely played a major role. A 2024 study published in PLOS One found that many of the gray whales examined during the mortality event were thin or emaciated, helping confirm malnutrition — not disease — as a major driver of the die-off. NOAA says changes in the northern Bering and Chukchi seas made it harder for gray whales to find enough prey, leaving many in poor condition during migration and resulting in more deaths and fewer calves.
Calambokidis said gray whales have gone through natural boom-and-bust cycles before, with food shortages helping regulate the population when Arctic feeding conditions turned bad. He said the whales bounced back after a major mortality event in 1999 and 2000, but this decline has lasted much longer and hit much harder. NOAA’s latest estimate put the eastern North Pacific gray whale population at about 13,000, the lowest since the 1970s, and calf production remains unusually low.
Biologists from Cascadia Research, WDFW and SR3 examine two adult gray whales in Ocean Shores, Washington, on April 4, 2026, one day after the whales washed ashore. One was male and the other female, and both were about 42 feet long.Courtesy of Cascade Research NMFS Permit 24359
A bad start to the season
Scientists are still watching the gray whale population closely, and this year is already off to a bad start in Washington, Calambokidis said. Cascadia Research has counted six dead gray whales so far as the main mortality period begins.
Gray whales are now migrating north past Oregon and Washington from the breeding and calving lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, to summer feeding grounds in Alaska and the Arctic. It is a round trip of roughly 10,000 miles to 12,000 miles, depending on the route. NOAA says gray whales face their greatest nutritional stress during the northbound migration, when they may be reaching the limits of their fat stores.
“This is the time of year that they’re just headed back to their feeding grounds,” he said. “So if they didn’t get enough to eat last year, this is where they’d be running out of their nutritional reserve and potentially looking for alternative areas to feed — or just not able to make it.”
Biologists from Cascadia Research, WDFW and SR3 examine two adult gray whales in Ocean Shores, Washington, on April 4, 2026, one day after the whales washed ashore. One was male and the other female, and both were about 42 feet long.Courtesy of Cascade Research NMFS Permit 24359
When whales go off course
Calambokidis said gray whales commonly feed in bays and estuaries, but it becomes more dangerous when they venture off the beaten path because they are starving. Weak, desperate whales can become more vulnerable to ship strikes and “disoriented and debilitated in ways that just takes them to unusual places,” he said.
In places like Grays Harbor, one common prey item is ghost shrimp, a burrowing shrimp that lives in soft sediment. That’s likely what whales feed on in that area, Calambokidis said. Some gray whales have had success using similar strategies in inland Washington waters. Since the 1990s, a small group of gray whales known as the “Sounders” has returned to North Puget Sound each year to feed on ghost shrimp.
But Calambokidis said the whale that pushed far up the Willapa River looked like something else.
“That’s just an animal kind of losing it,” he said.
Cascadia is now considering boat surveys in Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay to identify whales in the area, gauge their body condition and see whether prey is available. Calambokidis said researchers have heard there may be other whales in the same areas, though not up the river, and want to know whether more animals are in trouble.
