Something is killing gray whales | Los Angeles Times

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]

I don’t know if this is a new Los Angeles Times project, but they’re posting some excellent reports, such as this one, on their online website. Great writing plus beautiful graphics, photography and videography. Altogether, a work of art! However, people seem to have a difficult time first finding out about them and then finding them.

Something is killing gray whales. Is it a sign of oceans in peril?
Los Angeles Times | Susanne Rust, Carolyn Cole, Jennifer Lu & Rahul Mukherjee | 5 August 2021

SAN IGNACIO, Mexico — For thousands of years, the gray whales of the eastern Pacific have undertaken one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal — starting in the cold waters of the Arctic, then down past the densely populated coasts and beaches of California before finally finding refuge in the warm, shallow estuaries of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. Only to turn around and head back north a few weeks later.

San Ignacio Lagoon, west coast of Baja California.

Starting in December 2018, this magnificent migration took a fatal turn.

The bodies of California gray whales began washing up along the protected inlets of Baja, where gray whales come every spring to nurse their young and mate. The first to die was a young male, beached along the shore of Isla Arena, in Guerrero Negro Lagoon. Two days later, the decomposing body of a young female was found sloshing in waves along a beach in Ojo de Liebre Lagoon, just a few miles south of the first.

Then, on Jan. 4, 2019, three more young whales were found dead, all of them severely decomposed, in the same lagoon. Much more….

Susanne Rust has three other articles on California Gray Whales, all posted 5 August 2021, listed on her L.A. Times page.