Dead grey whales have been washing up on Washington State beaches in record numbers this year. We've had 30 strandings in 2026, which is less than the record of 35 from 2019, but we still have 5 months to go and the overall population is half of what it was in 2019.
I was fortunate enough to be backpacking on the coast recently and was able to observe the corpse of a juvenile grey whale stranded this summer in a state of advanced decomposition.
Grey whales grow up to 50ft long, so I estimate this one to be a juvenile.
As you can see, one of its vertebra is missing. I found it on the trail near where I had set up camp.
The orientation of this whale's head is upside down; note the large scoop shape of the lower jaw. Grey whales are benthic feeders, meaning they do barrel rolls along the ocean floor and scoop up sand which they filter through their baleen to sift out amphipods and other tiny crustaceans.
It's hard to tell based on the state of decomposition, but this whale as well as all the others who've washed up are malnourished. This is a symptom of a larger collapse of the Arctic Ocean food chain.
Ocean warming is causing sea ice to disappear earlier in the year, and the sea ice is home to algae that sink to the ocean floor and serve as the primary food source for the amphipods. The sea ice also slows the ocean currents, and without it the currents scrub away the silt from the ocean floor that the amphipods live in. The amphipod population is 9% of what it once was.
There has been an alarmingly high number of gray whale mortalities in Washington in 2026. The most common finding among examined whales is m
OverviewGray whales are among the more commonly sighted large whale species in the Salish Sea and along the coast of the Pacific Northwest,
Strandings So Far in 2026 Setting a Deadly Pace
More than 900 eastern North Pacific gray whales have been found dead along the shorelines of Mexico, Canada and the United States since 2019
