Another portent of AGW caused ecology collapse. The whales are bottom feeders whose food source has declined due to the fast and accelerating rate of temperature rise in the Arctic.
The whales are dying of malnutrition.
Doom is approaching and accelerating.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Gray-whales-starving-washing-up-dead... Quote:Gray whales starving, washing up dead in startling numbers along SF coast
The death toll, part of a disturbing mass die-off from Mexico to Alaska, is happening largely because there is too little food in the ecosystem to sustain the behemoths on one of the world’s longest migrations, experts say.
The hulking carcasses of nine gray whales, several of them starving, have been found since March in San Francisco Bay and along the coast from Pacifica to Point Reyes. That’s an unusually large number for the region.
“It’s definitely not normal,” said Mary Jane Schramm, spokeswoman for the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, which has for decades been monitoring the spectacular whale migrations along the San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin and Sonoma county coasts.
The desperately hungry grays are taking dangerous detours into San Francisco Bay to look for food, a treat for whale watchers who have been seeing the gargantuan beasts in the estuary since February — but not such a good sign for those who care about their survival.
“They are attempting to forage in the bay’s ‘dire straits’ with their ship-strike risk, unknown toxins in the bay mud, and other threats,” Schramm said. “Some cannot make it any farther and are simply giving up the ghost.”
The strandings are happening along the entire coast of California, where 31 dead gray whales have been found this year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. In all, 48 gray whales have been found dead along the coasts of California, Washington, Oregon and Alaska, fisheries service officials said.
That’s not as bad as 1999, when 91 dead grays were recovered, or 2000, when 131 were found dead. But that die-off came in the wake of an unusually strong El Niño weather pattern that spread warm water along the entire West Coast and disrupted the food web.
There is a mild El Niño this year, and water temperatures are higher than normal, but marine biologists say the balmy conditions locally do not fully explain the increased death toll, which also rose the previous two years.
The cause of the decline, experts say, is an intricate and complicated cascade of events, including retreating polar ice, a lack of algae growth and a decline in the bottom-dwelling Arctic critters that gray whales eat.
“The majority of them have been skinnier, younger animals,” said Justin Viezbicke, the stranding coordinator for National Marine Fisheries Service in Long Beach. “I think the changing water conditions are what led to the changes in food.”
The trouble has not yet spread to other whale species, like humpbacks, which also migrate past San Francisco.
The difference is that eastern North Pacific gray whales are the only baleen whales that feed primarily on the bottom of the ocean. As such, they are considered by many scientists the sentinels of ecosystem change.
The Pacific grays feed in the shallow coastal shelf waters of the Arctic during the summer, where they scoop up mouthfuls of mud and siphon out benthic amphipods, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans, through their baleen.
The grayish barnacle-covered cetaceans, which can reach 45 feet in length, rely on the Arctic mud to supply them with enough calories for a 11,000-mile migration, the longest of any whale.
The remarkable journey starts when the grays head south from November to January toward the warm lagoons of Baja California, where they breed and give birth. The nursing mothers leave their breeding grounds and migrate with their calves north past California from February to May.
It is a perilous journey for the creatures, which generally do not eat as they make a beeline toward the cold, food-rich waters of the north. The mothers use enormous amounts of energy nursing their calves, which can consume as much as 50 gallons of milk a day....