Washington, DC — The conservation success in recovering Pacific gray whales is now at risk due to accelerating mortality from multiple threats, including ship strikes and reduced food sources, given the latest official stranding figures released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As of July 6 of this year, 145 gray whale stranding deaths have been reported, a rate already exceeding yearly totals recorded during the last three years of the declared “Unusual Mortality Event” (UME) from 2019 to 2023.

Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) are located in the eastern North Pacific and migrate between 10,000 and 14,000 miles each year between their winter calving lagoons off Baja California and their Arctic feeding grounds. That migration takes this cetacean into the paths of increasingly large and fast commercial shipping, among other threats.

Figures compiled by NOAA indicate the following:

• The average annual number of gray whale strandings from 2006-2023 was 43, but saw a big spike in 2025 of 179 strandings, a number which may be surpassed in 2026;
• The stranding numbers are only the tip of the iceberg since most gray whale mortality is unobserved as carcasses often sink before they wash up on the beach. Scientific literature estimates the ratio between unobserved/sunk mortalities offshore and beached/observed mortalities for gray whales is between 7-to-1 and 25-to-1. Using a very conservative ratio of 9-to-1 for the 145 observed stranded whales so far in 2026, this means that another 1,305 may have died offshore, making their true total mortality rate so far this year likely around 1,450. For the 324 stranded mortalities reported in 2025 and so far in 2026, total gray whale mortalities could range from 2,268 – 8,100. Scientists consider this a “Catastrophic Mortality Event.”
• In 2019, the gray whale population estimate was 20,500; in 2023 the population had declined to 14,526, thus a loss of roughly 6,000 individual whales in five years, a decline of nearly 30% of the entire population. The number of stranded whales reported during that period was 690, which NOAA designated an Unusual Mortality Event. NOAA’s 2025 gray whale population estimate was 13,000 whales, the lowest since the 1970s.

“The gray whale appears to be suffering its second Catastrophic Mortality Event this decade,” stated Rick Steiner, an Alaska marine ecologist and Chair of PEER’s Board of Directors. “The loss of thousands of whales in just two years from a population at significant risk should be of concern to us all.”

“Gray whales seem to be starving, as Arctic sea ice decline is reducing their Arctic seabed prey resource. As we seek to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate this long-term threat, other shorter-term threats to these whales must also be reduced, including ship strikes, oil spills, entanglement in fishing gear, harmful algal blooms, microplastic pollution, ocean noise, disturbance, and the harvest in Russia.”

In March 2023, PEER and The Ocean Foundation proposed a comprehensive strategy to avoid ship strikes by establishing Whale Safety Zones in U.S. waters. And in August 2025, Professor Steiner petitioned NOAA to relist the gray whale on the federal Endangered Species Act list.

NOAA has yet to act on either the 2023 rulemaking petition or the 2025 ESA listing petition.

“Despite mounting threats, NOAA has yet to take any affirmative action to protect the gray whale,” added PEER Science Policy Director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and attorney formerly with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Further inaction by NOAA will push the West Coast population of gray whales into an extinction spiral.”

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Read NOAA 2025 gray whale status update

Chart West Coast Gray Whale strandings (2019-2026)

See basis for ratio between observed mortalities vs. total mortalities (sunk and lost offshore)

Read the 2025 petition to list gray whales on ESA list 

Revisit pending PEER petition to reduce ship strikes

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