Nineteenth-century whalers called gray whales "devilfish." Not for their looks — for what a harpooned mother would do. She would ram whaleboats, splinter their hulls, and fight to keep her calf, and enough whalers died finding that out that the name stuck. Yankee crews found the species' Baja California breeding lagoons in the 1850s — Captain Charles Melville Scammon is credited with locating the one that now bears his name — and within roughly two decades of that discovery, commercial whaling had driven the eastern North Pacific population to the edge of extinction.
It came back. Protected from commercial whaling, the population rebuilt for decades and was removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1994 — one of the real conservation successes of the 20th century. By around 2016 it had grown to roughly 27,000 animals, likely close to what these waters supported before whaling ever started.
Gray whales may be important sentinels of ecosystem changes to come.NOAA Fisheries, "Sentinels of Change: Gray Whales in the Arctic" →
Then it started swinging, hard, and NOAA started calling gray whales something specific: a "sentinel species" for the Arctic. From December 2018 to November 2023, NOAA tracked 690 stranded gray whales — 347 in the U.S., 316 in Mexico, 27 in Canada — in what it declared an Unusual Mortality Event. Necropsies kept finding the same thing: malnutrition, no infectious disease. The trail led to their summer feeding grounds in the northern Bering and Chukchi Seas, where Arctic warming has been changing how much prey — small crustaceans called amphipods — is there to eat, and how accessible it is. Research published in Science in 2023 adds a sharper point: gray whales seem to crash hard only when their population is already near what the Arctic can feed, and evidence suggests that ceiling is now being lowered by warming itself. The 2016 peak wasn't just a high number — it may have been the Arctic's limit, and that limit appears to be shrinking.
That is the volatility behind the number on this page right now. NOAA's July 2026 count put the population at about 17,750, up sharply from 2025's 12,890 — but NOAA's own scientists flagged the jump as implausibly large given how few calves were actually born (85 in 2025, the lowest on record), and strandings have climbed back into the range last seen during the 2018–2023 die-off. Nobody at NOAA is calling this a recovery.
And yet the same species that earned the name "devilfish" defending its calves now does something no whaler could have imagined. In 1972, a fisherman named Francisco "Pachico" Mayoral was in his boat in Baja California's San Ignacio Lagoon when a gray whale approached and let him touch it — by most accounts, pushed itself into his hand. The behavior wasn't a fluke; it spread, and whale-watchers still travel to San Ignacio for it today, where mothers with calves reliably approach small boats to be touched, decades after that first contact. Less reliably, similar encounters happen at Ojo de Liebre and Magdalena Bay too. Nobody knows exactly why it happens; what's documented is the behavior itself, generation after generation — the same animal that fought hardest to protect its young now brings them close enough to touch.