Key Points
This reduction in size could have major consequences for the health and reproductive success of these whales, while also serving as an alarming indicator of potential issues within their marine food web...
In a concerning discovery, a new study from Oregon State University (OSU) has revealed that gray whales spending their summers feeding in the shallow waters off the Pacific Northwest coast have undergone a significant decline in body length since around the year 2000...
The study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, focused on the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG), a subset of approximately 200 gray whales within the larger Eastern North Pacific population...
Changes in this balance, potentially driven by climate change's impact on wind patterns and water temperatures, could disrupt the ecosystem's ability to produce enough prey to support the whales' large size...
As researchers continue to investigate the causes and consequences of this decline, they plan to examine environmental drivers contributing to changes in the whales' body condition during their ongoing field studies of the PCFG subgroup...
