Beached Gray Whale: An Eyewitness Account and Complete Gray Whale Guide

A beached gray whale, and what the necropsy found

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

A casual scroll through Facebook led me to one of the hardest wildlife encounters of my life. A post about a beached gray whale in West Seattle caught my eye, and an hour later I was standing on Arroyo Beach next to a 37 foot animal lying motionless on the sand.

What the researchers pulled out of its stomach made the news: more than twenty plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, a pair of sweatpants, plastic fragments, duct tape, and a golf ball. The story that spread afterward was that plastic killed this whale. The truth is more complicated than that, and in some ways worse. I will get to it.

This is what I saw that day, and everything I have learned since about gray whales, why they strand, and how to tell one from a humpback.

An Unexpected Discovery on Arroyo Beach

It was the fourth gray whale stranding in Puget Sound in a matter of weeks, part of a pattern that had researchers worried. When I got to the beach I spotted the whale immediately. It is difficult to explain the scale of a 37 foot animal until one is lying still in front of you. The size was awe inspiring and the stillness was awful, in the same instant.

Researchers from the Cascadia Research Collective were already working. Yellow tape ran along the sand reading PROTECTED MARINE MAMMAL, which is a strange thing to read on a body.

What the Necropsy Actually Found

This is the part most retellings get wrong, and I want to get it right.

The necropsy did turn up all that debris. It also found that the garbage made up only one to two percent of the whale’s stomach contents, and that there was no clear indication the debris had caused the animal’s death. The whale was in better nutritional condition than several other gray whales that had died in the Sound around the same time. Cascadia never determined a definitive cause of death.

So no, a golf ball did not kill this whale. What the debris did prove is where it had been feeding. Gray whales eat by rolling onto one side and vacuuming up the seafloor, straining out small crustaceans through their baleen. To end up with duct tape and surgical gloves in your stomach, you have to be hoovering the bottom of an industrial waterway. That is what this whale had been doing, along with everything else that settles down there: not just plastic, but contaminants.

I find that harder to sit with than the simple version. A single lethal golf ball would be a freak accident. A whale calmly filtering its way through the sediment of Puget Sound, taking in whatever we have let sink into it, is not an accident. It is a description of the water.

Up Close With the Whale

Standing beside the body, the details came at me one at a time. Deep parallel gashes along the skin, almost certainly orca rake marks from somewhere along the migration. Barnacles crusted across the head and back, burrowed into the skin, whole colonies of them. Whale lice moving through the rough patches between.

The baleen was the thing I could not stop looking at. Rows of coarse keratin plates hanging from the upper jaw, frayed at the inner edge into a mat of bristles. It is one of the most elegant feeding structures in nature, and it filters food out of mud with total indifference to what else is in the mud.

An Emotional Farewell

As the day went on, people came. They stood in small groups on the sand and they did not really talk. A young girl laid flowers against the whale’s flank. Others reached out and put a hand on its side, eyes closed. Some of them cried.

I have photographed a lot of the ocean and I have rarely seen people respond to an animal like that. Nobody had to be told what they were looking at. When the tide came up, the researchers towed the carcass away to a private beach to finish the work.

What Is a Gray Whale?

The gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus, is a baleen whale of the eastern North Pacific and the only living member of its family. Adults run 40 to 50 feet and 30 to 40 tons, with females slightly larger than males. They live 50 to 70 years, sometimes longer.

Three things make them unusual. They have no dorsal fin, only a low ridge of bumps down the back. They are bottom feeders, which almost no other large whale is. And they hug the coast, which is why they are the whale most people on the west coast of North America have actually seen from shore.

Their skin is mottled grey and white, and much of that pattern is not skin at all but barnacles and the pale scars they leave behind. A gray whale looks, up close, like a piece of the seafloor that learned to swim.

Gray Whale vs Humpback Whale: How to Tell Them Apart

These are the two whales people most often confuse along the Pacific coast, and they are not actually hard to separate once you know what to look at.

The dorsal fin, which settles it immediately

Gray whales have no dorsal fin. There is a low hump and then a row of small knuckles running down to the tail. Humpbacks have an obvious rounded dorsal fin sitting on an arched back, which is where the name comes from. If you can see a fin, it is not a gray whale.

The flippers

Gray whale flippers are short and paddle shaped, around 12 to 13 percent of body length. Humpback flippers are absurd: up to a third of the animal’s entire length, sometimes over 15 feet, the longest appendages of any whale. If a whale breaches with two enormous white wings spread out, that is a humpback.

The skin

Gray whales are mottled grey and white and heavily encrusted with barnacles and whale lice. Humpbacks are dark grey to black above with white markings on the belly, throat and flippers, and their skin is comparatively clean.

How they feed

Gray whales roll onto one side and suck sediment off the seafloor. Humpbacks feed up in the water column, lunging through bait balls and herding prey with bubble nets. Gray whales rarely breach fully clear of the water. Humpbacks do it constantly.

Size

• Gray whale: 40 to 50 feet, 30 to 40 tons
• Humpback whale: 46 to 56 feet, up to about 40 tons

They overlap enough that size alone will not tell you. Look at the back. If you want the full picture on the other species, I wrote a guide to what a humpback whale looks like from a lot of time in the water with them.

Two other comparisons worth knowing

Gray whale vs blue whale: blue whales are far bigger, 80 to 100 feet, uniformly slate blue grey, with a tiny dorsal fin set well back. There is no real confusing the two once you see the scale.

Gray whale vs orca: orcas are much smaller, sharply black and white, with a tall dorsal fin. They also hunt gray whale calves during the northbound migration. Adult grays fight back, often successfully, and the rake marks on the whale at Arroyo Beach are what that fight leaves behind.

Where Do Gray Whales Live? Range and Migration

Gray whales live in the eastern North Pacific and nowhere else, apart from a small and endangered western population of a few hundred animals off Russia. The eastern population makes an annual round trip of roughly 10,000 miles, one of the longest migrations of any mammal.

The route

• Summer feeding grounds: the Bering and Chukchi Seas, off Alaska and far eastern Russia, where they spend about half the year eating amphipods off the bottom.
• Southbound, roughly October to January: down the Pacific coast through Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California to Mexico.
• Winter breeding lagoons: Laguna Ojo de Liebre, Laguna San Ignacio and Magdalena Bay, in Baja California Sur. Mothers give birth and nurse in the warm shallows.
• Northbound, roughly February to May: back to the Arctic, with mothers and calves travelling last and closest to shore, away from orcas.

Puget Sound is not on the route, exactly. Gray whales detour into it, usually on the way north, and it tends to happen in years when the feeding has gone badly. That detour is part of how a whale ends up on a beach in West Seattle.

Where gray whales are not

Some geography worth clearing up, because people search for these constantly.

Costa Rica has no gray whales. The species does not range past Mexico and never enters Central American waters. The whales people go to Costa Rica to see are humpbacks, which show up from both hemispheres at different times of year, along with pilot whales and false killer whales.

The Atlantic has no gray whales, effectively. There was an Atlantic population and whaling wiped it out around the 1700s. A handful of individuals have appeared in the Atlantic since 2010, off Israel, Namibia and Spain, which suggests the odd animal is now finding a route through a melting Arctic. They are not a population.

Hawaii has no gray whales. Too far west, too far from the coastline they navigate by. Hawaii gets humpbacks, roughly December through April.

Where to actually see one

• From shore during the migration: Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, Point Reyes in northern California, Depoe Bay in Oregon, and the Washington coast.
• Best timing: late December into January for the faster southbound run, and February to mid April northbound, when mothers and calves pass close in.
• Up close: the Baja lagoons, especially Laguna San Ignacio and Magdalena Bay in February and March, where the calves are famously curious about boats.

Why Do Whales Beach Themselves?

There is almost never a single answer, and that is worth saying plainly because the internet prefers a clean villain.

Whales strand because they are starving, or sick, or carrying a heavy parasite load. Because they were hit by a ship or tangled in fishing gear. Because they are old. Because something disoriented them in shallow, complicated water. In social species like pilot whales, because one confused animal led the pod ashore and the rest followed. Often several of these at once, in an animal that was already close to the edge.

And a great many stranded whales were already dead offshore. The beach is not where they died. It is only where the tide put them.

The gray whale strandings in Puget Sound are their own story. When the Arctic feeding season goes badly, whales arrive on the southbound migration underweight and stay hungry, and hungry gray whales come into places like the Sound looking for food that is not really there. The population went through an Unusual Mortality Event from 2019 to 2023 and the count fell from roughly 27,000 in the mid 2010s to somewhere between 11,700 and 14,500 in the most recent survey. That is not a plastic story. That is a food story, and the food is a climate story.

Gray Whales and Barnacles

Gray whales carry a barnacle that lives on gray whales and on essentially nothing else. It is called Cryptolepas rhachianecti, and it embeds itself directly into the skin, clustering thickest on the head and back. A single adult whale can be carrying hundreds of pounds of them.

It makes sense once you think about how a gray whale lives. It swims slowly. It follows the coast. It rolls around on the seafloor in shallow water. If you were designing conditions for a barnacle to settle on something and stay there, that is the brief.

The barnacles do not seem to hurt the whale. They get a slow moving, constantly feeding home. The whale gets a permanent crust of passengers and the pale ring scars that stay behind after they drop off. Those scars are half the reason a gray whale looks the way it does.

Whale Falls: How a Dead Whale Feeds the Deep for Decades

When a whale dies at sea and sinks, it does not simply rot. It becomes an event.

The deep seafloor is one of the hungriest places on earth. Almost nothing grows down there and food arrives as a thin drizzle of particles from far above. Then, occasionally, thirty tons of it lands at once.

What follows is a succession that plays out over decades. Sleeper sharks, hagfish and amphipods strip the soft tissue, sometimes within months. Then worms, crustaceans and molluscs move into the exposed bones and the enriched sediment around them. Finally, bacteria go to work on the fats locked inside the skeleton itself, and they support a community that looks remarkably like the one around a hydrothermal vent. Some species have never been found anywhere except on the bones of dead whales.

I studied whale falls in college and I thought about them the entire time I stood on that beach. This animal was towed away rather than left to sink, which is usually the right call near a city. But it is worth knowing what a whale is worth to the ocean even after it dies. There is no waste in it at all.

How to Help

If you find a stranded marine mammal in Washington, Oregon or California, call the NOAA West Coast stranding hotline at 1-866-767-6114. Give them the location, the time, whether the animal is alive or dead, and photographs if you can take them safely. Then stay back, and keep dogs away. A live whale can roll and kill someone without meaning to, and a dead one is a biohazard that builds up gas as it decomposes.

Beyond that: the debris in that whale came off the bottom of an industrial waterway, and it got there the ordinary way, a piece at a time. Cascadia Research Collective does the necropsies that tell us what is actually happening to these animals rather than what makes the best headline, and they are worth supporting.

More of my work on what is happening to the ocean, and what the data says rather than what we assume, is in Is the Ocean Going to Be Okay? If you want the other end of the whale family, there is Baird’s beaked whales and whale sharks, which are not whales at all.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Gray Whales

How big are gray whales?

Adult gray whales reach about 40 to 50 feet long and weigh 30 to 40 tons. Females run slightly larger than males. Calves are roughly 15 feet at birth. The whale that stranded at Arroyo Beach was 37 feet, a near adult male.

What is the difference between a gray whale and a humpback whale?

The dorsal fin is the giveaway. Gray whales have no dorsal fin at all, just a low ridge of bumps or knuckles along the back. Humpbacks have a clear rounded dorsal hump. Gray whales also have short paddle shaped flippers, mottled grey skin crusted with barnacles, and they feed by rolling on one side and sucking sediment off the bottom. Humpbacks have enormous flippers up to a third of their body length, cleaner dark skin with white markings, and they feed in open water using bubble nets. Both species run roughly 45 to 55 feet.

Where do gray whales live?

Gray whales live in the eastern North Pacific. They migrate between summer feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi Seas, off Alaska and far eastern Russia, and winter breeding lagoons in Baja California Sur, Mexico. The round trip is roughly 10,000 miles, one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal. A separate, endangered western North Pacific population of a few hundred animals survives off Russia.

Are there gray whales in Costa Rica?

No. Gray whales are an eastern North Pacific species and their range ends in Mexico. They do not travel into Central America. The whales people see off Costa Rica are mostly humpbacks, which arrive from both the northern and southern hemispheres at different times of year, along with pilot whales, false killer whales and others.

Are there gray whales in the Atlantic or in Hawaii?

Not regularly. The Atlantic gray whale population was hunted to extinction around the 1700s, though a handful of individuals have turned up in the Atlantic since 2010, which suggests a few animals are finding their way through. Hawaii sits far outside the migration route. The whales in Hawaii are humpbacks, present roughly December through April.

Why do whales beach themselves?

There is rarely one cause. Strandings are linked to malnutrition, illness and parasites, injury from ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, disorientation from sonar or unfamiliar water, and simple old age. Social species like pilot whales sometimes strand in groups when one disoriented animal leads the rest ashore. Many stranded whales are already dead when they wash up, and the beach is just where the current put them.

What do gray whales eat?

Gray whales are bottom feeders, which makes them unusual among the large whales. They roll onto one side, suck up a mouthful of mud and sediment from the seafloor, and strain out small crustaceans, mainly amphipods, through their baleen. During the feeding season an adult can take in well over a ton of food a day. It also means they ingest whatever else is lying on the bottom where they feed.

Are gray whales endangered?

The eastern North Pacific population is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, but that label hides a sharp recent decline. Counts fell from roughly 27,000 in the mid 2010s to an estimated 11,700 to 14,500 in the 2024 to 2025 survey, after an Unusual Mortality Event that ran from 2019 to 2023. The western North Pacific population is endangered, with only a few hundred animals left.

Why do gray whales have so many barnacles?

They swim slowly, hug the coastline, and roll on their sides in shallow water to feed. That is close to ideal conditions for a barnacle. Gray whales carry a barnacle found on no other animal, Cryptolepas rhachianecti, which embeds itself in the skin and clusters on the head and back. An adult whale can carry hundreds of pounds of them. The barnacles do not appear to harm the whale.

What is a whale fall?

A whale fall is what happens when a whale dies at sea and sinks. The carcass becomes a temporary deep sea ecosystem. Scavengers such as sleeper sharks and hagfish strip the soft tissue over months, then worms and crustaceans colonise the bones, and finally bacteria break down the fats locked inside the skeleton. The whole succession can support life for decades. In a part of the ocean where food almost never arrives, a dead whale is a windfall.

What should I do if I find a stranded whale?

Keep your distance and call it in. In Washington, Oregon or California, the NOAA West Coast stranding hotline is 1-866-767-6114. Report the location, the time, whether the animal is alive or dead, and the species if you know it. Do not approach, do not push a live animal back into the water, and keep dogs away. Live whales can roll and crush people, and dead ones carry pathogens and can build up gas as they decompose.

How long do gray whales live?

Gray whales generally live 50 to 70 years, and some reach past 80. They reach breeding age around 6 to 8 years and females produce a single calf every two to three years after a gestation of about 13 months. That slow reproductive rate is why populations recover slowly once they crash.