Matt Van Daele remembers the moment he realized something was up with the gray whales near Kodiak. It was the middle of last summer, and the Sun'aq tribe natural resources director thought he’d drive a few minutes to check how many gray whales had arrived in their feeding grounds off of Pasagshak Bay, at the south end of the island’s road system.
He was expecting to see a handful at most. Instead, he got much more than he bargained for.
“We’re, you know, scanning the horizon, and it looked like smokestacks from all the whales breathing," he said.
Van Daele estimated he saw nearly 150 whales that day, and that number grew to nearly 300 by the end of the season. The previous year, he said he saw around 20-30. So far, he said it's looking like the same high numbers will be returning this year.
Van Daele isn’t the only one who’s noticed more gray whales than normal in Alaska waters. Lauren Wild, a research biologist and assistant professor of applied fisheries with the University of Alaska Southeast’s Sitka campus, said there were maybe 10 or 15 whales coming through the sound every year to feed when she was growing up in Sitka. But in 2020, that changed.
“When I was out collecting herring eggs, I counted just sort of skiffing around with a friend, so not an official number, but I counted close to 200 individuals," she said, adding that this high number has remained the norm in Sitka since.
These shifts are happening as the gray whale population at large is tanking, and scientists think places like Kodiak could be offering the whales a lifeline.
Gray whales were hunted almost to extinction in the early 1900s. Hunting bans helped the population recover, until around 2019 that is. That’s when scientists started seeing more dead gray whales than normal, and fewer calves being born. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration designated it as an unusual mortality event.
NOAA announced the die-off was over in 2023, when the population looked like it was recovering. But with the amount of whales that have been dying off the coast of Washington state this year, scientists think they may have celebrated too soon.
Carley Lowe, a marine mammal specialist with NOAA’s protected resources division, said there were 61 gray whales strandings along the west coast in 2024. In 2025 there were 179—Lowe said that this year, there have been at least 127, and the season isn't done yet.
"They are still stranding in Alaska, so we expect that number to go up as well,” she said.
Scientists from Baja, Mexico to Alaska gathered on a video call last month to share what they’ve been learning about gray whales, and what could be causing them to die.
One of them was John Calambokidis, a co-founder and research biologist at the Cascadia Research collective, a Washington nonprofit that studies marine mammals. He said the leading theory is that warming water in the Arctic, caused by climate change, has led to a massive drop in the available food out in the Bering and Chukchi seas, where gray whales typically bulk up in the summer.
“The Arctic is an area that has seen, over multiple decades, pretty dramatic ecosystem changes, and where some of the areas gray whales feed that are monitored, there’s been dramatic declines in the prey abundance,” Calambokidis said.
Van Daele was on the call last month too. He said, after comparing notes, one thing was clear: gray whales are showing up in places they don’t usually go. The waters off San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia, for instance, have seen more gray whales than previous years—just like Kodiak. He said this is probably because of the conditions in the Arctic: with nothing to eat at their normal buffet, the whales are looking for new grub.
“They’re very intelligent creatures, they’re individuals, and so they’re going to go where the feed is,” Van Daele said.
But not everywhere has the same type of food source. In San Francisco Bay, scientists estimate that at least one in five gray whales are dying there from starvation or boat strikes.
But in parts of Alaska, grays are leaving with their bellies full. Wild and Van Daele both said they’ve seen many whales in noticeably better body condition at the end of their stays than at the beginning.
Scientists still aren’t sure what other impacts this shift will have. In some places, like Sitka and Puget Sound, Calambokidis said they could see more conflicts between whales and fishermen. In Kodiak, Van Daele said their impact could be more positive.
“We’ll probably see a rebound and a bloom of species richness out there because of the gray whales’ presence,” he said.
Van Daele said that in a season of abysmal news for grays, places like Kodiak "offer a rare bright spot."
