Whale remains wash up at San Francisco’s Crissy Field
The remains of a gray whale spotted in Northern California on Friday are those of a whale that was initially spotted dead last week, officials say.
Fox – Ktvu
Five more gray whales were found dead in the San Francisco Bay Area within the past week, bringing this year’s total number of whale deaths up to 14, according to the California Academy of Sciences.
One yearling gray whale was found dead on May 21, an adult gray whale on May 22, another subadult on May 24 and two more adults on May 26, the San Francisco museum confirmed on May 28. The sightings of the stranded whales have been scattered across the Bay Area, varying from Alcatraz, Point Bonita, Berkeley, Southeast Farallon Island and Bolinas.
With 13 gray whale and one minke whale deaths confirmed this year, the academy said 2025 has proven to be an unusually high year for fatalities.
Many cause of deaths for the 2025 whale deaths prior to the past week came out to be inconclusive, according to Sue Pemberton, the California Academy of Sciences’ Associate Manager for Ornithology and Mammalogy. She said researchers must have enough supporting documentation to form a solid conclusion.
However others turned out to be the result of a vessel strike, which Pemberton said still occur even amid stronger collaborative efforts to avoid them.
The group has not seen this many gray whale deaths in a single year since 15 died in 2021 and 14 in 2019, both during the height of what experts call the Unusual Mortality Event. The Eastern North Pacific gray whale population dropped by around 45% following these events.
Determining a whale’s cause of death can be challenging
Identifying the cause of death is often challenging for researchers unable to perform necropsies due to advanced decomposition or to the mammals being in inaccessible locations, the academy said.
Pemberton said researchers typically only have about a four or five hour window to perform the examination.
“So there are certain areas of the body that we focus on. We’re not only looking for cause of death, but also to rule in or rule out whether it was a human caused interaction,” Pemberton told USA TODAY. “Traumatized muscle looks very different than healthy muscle muscle, even in a really decomposed animal.”
Overall gray whale sightings in 2025 ‘unusually high’
The academy also reported an “unusually high number” of gray whale sightings across the Bay Area this year, totaling 33. The gray whales are expected to stay in the bay for another one to two weeks before heading the arctic feeding grounds as part of their annual northern migration.
Only four gray whales were spotted in the bay last year, according to the academy, who said researchers are investigating the reason behind the 2025 “massive spike.”
While it is unclear how the five whales died this week, the organization warned that vessel strikes pose a major risk to whales, whether from large commercial ships to sailboats. Experts are urging all boaters to “be ‘whale aware’ and continue to slow down.”
“Gray whales often have a very low profile in the water that can make them difficult to sight, unlike other coastal whales like humpback whales,” the academy said.
(This story has been updated to add new information)
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