Recovery of the Gray Whale

Of the baleen whales, least is known about the medium-sized "gray whale".

The gray whale was commercially discovered by whaling captain Charles M. Scammon in 1857 as he explored the coast of Baja, California, on his way home from a bad season in the North Pacific. (Scammon Bay, Alaska was named after Captain Scammon, though apparently, he never visited this Bering Sea port.)

Captain Scammon and other whalers soon established a fishery to take the twenty-five barrels of oil to be gotten from each gray whale. Cornered in their shallow Baja, California calving grounds, the gray whales were so easily caught that they were nearly totally destroyed within 20 years.

By 1900, gray whales were not seen along the California coast and were thought to be extinct. A few reappeared there in the 1920's but whalers attacked them again. Hunting was banned in 1946 when, according to August Pivorunas, writing in the July-August issue of American Scientist, not more than a few hundred gray whales could have been left in the entire Pacific Ocean.

Now, less than 40 years later, ten thousand gray whales roam the American coast. The gray whale winters around the Aleutian Islands from where it migrates each year southward along both the American and Asian coasts.

Why has the gray whale recovered so rapidly, while other baleen whales are not able to rebound quickly from over-harvesting? The answer may be in their feeding habits. Grays are the only whales that feed on the shallow ocean-bottom. They eat worms, kelp and other small bottom creatures as well as the small crustaceans called krill that other whales eat near the ocean surface.

Perhaps the gray whales' affinity for shallow water makes them hard to hunt in the open ocean and more prone to stay in national waters where fishing regulations can be strictly enforced.