Local whales in trouble: Oregon's grey's impacted by climate change

From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dutt. We live in the Beaver State, and many people first think of salmon when they think Oregon, but the gray whale can certainly be considered our state's most iconic animal. After all, hundreds of thousands of Oregonians have them on their license plates. Yet, such adoration isn't helping the species survive the new reality of climate change. Today on the show, you'll hear from an OSU scientist who's been studying our gray whales for years and has grave concerns about the population off our coast because they can't find enough to eat due to climactic changes in their environment. It's strange but true. Some of the largest animals on the planet are literally starving to death. Then, at the end of the show, we'll talk with our reporter about a sticky tax issue happening in Corvallis. That's next on Oregon on the Record. Thanks for watching! By the thousands, people flock to the Oregon coast each year to board boats or crowd along viewpoints off the highway to catch a glimpse of water spouts and tail flukes, the telltale signs of Oregon's gray whales. But as a recent report shows, these whales are in trouble and it's our warming planet that's the culprit. An OSU scientist now explains. Lee Torres, professor at Oregon State University, working at the Marine Mammal Institute. Lee, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.

Yeah, so happy to be here to talk with you. Yeah.

Let's start with this. Tell listeners, what is the Pacific Coast Feeding Group?

Yeah, they're this special little group of gray whales, so about 200 of them, that have been using our coastline here in the Pacific Northwest between Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia for about the last 60 or 80 years. And so instead of migrating all the way up to the Arctic to feed up there, they feed right here off our coast.

So traditionally, there's been enough nutrients in our waters off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington so they can stay here. Is that basically it?

Yeah. So they feed differently here than they do in the Arctic. So here they're targeting zooplankton that's in the water column a lot. So a little zooplankton called mycid. They're really productive in our reef and kelp habitat, so that's why we see these PCFG gray whales really close to shore because they're often feeding on these reefs that are covered in kelp where their primary prey, those mysids, are. But yeah, with changing environmental conditions everywhere, but including here on our coast off of Oregon, The nutrients that support those mysid swarms and the temperature is changing that has helped kelp to grow. All of that is impacting the food availability for gray whales. So we're definitely documenting changes in the whales' presence here, their health, you know, how much feeding they're doing. So yeah, environmental change is certainly impacting these whales.

Well, let's dig into that. So you've been studying this group for quite some time. What are you seeing? First of all, how do you study them? And then what are some of the findings that you're seeing, again, based on what you just talked about, environmental