TRAGEDY STALKS THE FRIENDLY GRAY WHALES

A DEVASTATING NOAA REPORT

While I’ve been exploring the Buga Sphere saga and its profound implications for humanity, very bad news has come in about perhaps the most “magical” inhabitants of our own planet. These are the eastern Pacific gray whales that have been mysteriously greeting people at their birthing lagoons along Mexico’s Baja Peninsula for the past fifty years, mothers introducing their 2,000-pound newborns (who amazingly like to have their gums rubbed!) to small boatloads of visitors., There is no experience like it on planet earth.

If there is any single thing that most hurts my heart about the environmental devastation impacting our planet, it is the sudden unprecedented decline of these gray whales. Twenty-five years ago, i was present at Laguna San Ignacio for what became a celebratory victory - after Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo cancelled a proposed industrial saltworks with Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation. This occurred after Zedillo’s wife not only touched but kissed a “friendly” gray whale. That moment culminated a multi-year fight by environmental groups to protect the whales’ last pristine habitat.

At the time, I was completing my book Eye of the Whale, in which I wrote toward the end: “The fight to protect this ‘sacred nursery,’ a fight that captured the attention of so many - whether they’d had direct contact with these whales or not - represents something beyond environmental awareness or fervor. What is hurting them is hurting us. As the oceans go, so go we. Can we survive global warming? Noise pollution? The wanton carelessness about our habitats? Can we pretend to endure anything that the whales cannot? Can we come to grips with the suicidal tendency to destroy what sustains us? Is this what the gray whales are reaching out to communicate?”

This past spring, I was preparing to revisit the lagoon with my wife, her 14-year-old grandson, and a few other friends. Then word came from the ecotourism camp that only a handful of gray whales had shown up to bear their young at the end of their 5,000-mile migratory journey from the Arctic - a journey that’s been going on for millennia, the longest made by any marine mammal.

I checked in with Steven Swartz, who’s been studying gray whales at the lagoon for decades. Yes, it was true. Many now were washing ashore dead along their migration route. They were emaciated and appeared to be malnourished. While they used to arrive “fat and happy” at the end of their southern migration, following months-long bottom feeding on crustacean-like amphipods in their summer/fall Arctic habitat, the adults could be seen foraging fruitlessly in places like San Francisco Bay.

While there was what’s called an “unusual mortality event” two years ago, this is far worse. A mere 85 calves born in one of several lagoons were counted accompanying their mothers back to the Arctic. That’s the lowest number since record-keeping began in 1994; almost 2,000 mother-calf pairs were seen in 2004. A report just released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) informs: “Low calf numbers since 2019 indicate that reproduction has remained too low for the population to rebound.”

The total migration numbers have shocked scientists. A decade ago, some 27,000 gray whales were counted. This year, the numbers fell to an all-time low of 13,000. Before whaling was banned, the grays were hunted almost to extinction more than a century ago in the lagoons. Now a different human culprit is to blame, and it has everything to do with a changing climate.

Here’s what’s going on, and it’s not new news. The problem has been steadily escalating since I published my book in 2001. Over the past forty years, the Arctic has warmed at a rate nearly four times greater than the rest of the planet. At the apex of the gray whales’ migration, hotter ocean waters are making sea ice melt faster and farther north. Before this happened, the ice served to “feed” a kind of algae that attaches to the underside. These algae eventually die and sink, to basically fertilize the ocean bottom, which leads to growth of the little shrimp-like creatures that provide the main diet for the grays. They don’t customarily eat krill as other large whale species do, and as toothless baleen whales the grays don’t go after fish or other marine mammals. Now, according to ecologist Josh Stewart of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, the algae that’s crucial to their food chain is “getting mixed into the water column, causing a huge shift in the amount of available biomass.” Because of climate change melting the sea ice, the gray whale food supply is drastically reduced.

It’s a whole other situation where I live in Los Angeles County: too many algal blooms. Here record numbers of sea lions and dolphins have also been washing onto beaches. Scientists believe the die-offs are likely related to demoic acid, a neurotoxin found in algae that sickens fish which are then eaten by the marine mammals. Runoff from the terrible wildfires plays a large role. When organic matter from trees or wood burn, the ash is rich in nitrates, which flooding out into the ocean then super-charges algal growth.

But funding cuts to NOAA have frozen further research into the causes. Indeed, a newly released budget document from the Trump Administration proposes to end funding for the agency’s climate laboratories, zeroing out regional climate data and information. This includes shutting down the Mauna Loa lab in Hawaii, where scientists have been gathering the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since 1958. “The global warming hoax, it just never ends,” the president has said. As for rising sea levels, “I say, great, we have more waterfront property.”

It seems fitting that I recently stayed in Mexico City with my longtime dear friends Homero and Betty Aridjis. Homero, now 85, remains the country’s most renowned poet, and has also served as Mexico’s ambassador to two countries and UNESCO. In the mid-1980s, he became the nation’s leading environmental activist, founding the Grupo de Los Cien, a non-profit devoted to preserving Mexico’s whales, sea turtles, and monarch butterflies.

Some years back, I opened Eye of the Whale with Homero’s poem bearing the same title. One stanza particularly stood out when I re-read it today:

for there is no splendor greater than the gray

when the light turns it to silver

Its bottomless breath

is an exhalation."

Here were the key elements of the team that saved Laguna San Ignacio from the industrial saltworks in 2000: Joel Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Homero Aridjis, and Jean-Michel Cousteau.

So I’ll close this column with a suggestion. Since RFK Jr. has experienced firsthand the touch of these majestic animals - and is now a leading member of the Trump administration - might he ask the President to consider taking a paid vacation to Laguna San Ignacio next March? It could do wonders for the relationship with our neighboring country. Perhaps Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s President with a scientific background studying climate change, might even be willing to join them and experience what Zedillo’s wife did 25 years ago. The whales that are still able to make the journey somehow remain interested in becoming friends.

It could be a life-changer for the presidents. You never know.