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Bluish-tinged tongue lolling out, the gray whale lay in near silence on the sand of Long Beach, Washington. The rhythmic whap, whap, whap of small waves lapping its belly punctuated the silence. An oily, rotten odor surrounded the behemoth, which tipped the scales at 2,200 kilograms, the equivalent of four heavy-duty SUVs. It was April of 2019, and this whale was one of 34 that Jessie Huggins, who coordinates responses to marine mammal strandings in Washington State, helped to photograph, dissect, and discard that year. Finding a few gray whales washed up on the coast each year is common, she says, but last year 215 of them washed up along the marine mammal’s migration route between Alaska and Baja. And so far this year, there have been more than 160 strandings.
“Something’s clearly going on,” says Sue Moore, an ecologist at the University of Washington who ...
