Gray whale - Threats

Shipping and whale lanes: deadly crossings for cetaceans

Like other large whales, gray whales are now threatened by environmental change, including habitat loss and toxics, and are also harmed by ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, especially during their annual migrations through the coastal waters of Japan, Korea, and China.

The eastern North Pacific population of gray whales, numbering more than 17,000 whales, is a great conservation success story and was removed from the United States Endangered Species List in 1994. Today they are subject to a small aboriginal hunt off the coast of the northwestern US.

The north-west Pacific gray whale population is currently most severely threatened by the development of a major oil and gas field in its principal summer feeding area off Sakhalin Island in Russia's Okhotsk Sea.

The extensive multinational project includes platform dredging, an undersea pipeline to be trenched through the benthic feeding habitat of the gray whales, and the dumping of drilling wastes into the sea. Operating in difficult climate and seismic conditions, including high earthquake activity, heavy ice pack, frequent storms and fog, the project presents risks of a catastrophic oil spill not unlike that of the Exxon Valdez.