Open Endings: The Eastern North Pacific Gray Whale Unusual Mortality Event, 1999-2000

Unlike anything in the recorded history, between 1999 and 2000, 651 eastern North Pacific gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) were discovered stranded on the west coasts of Mexico, the USA and Canada (see table 1). The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) of the U.S. government body, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), consulted the official Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events, which officially declared this surge in strandings an "unusual mortality event" (UME) (Gulland et al. 2005, 1, 2). A UME is defined under the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act as "a stranding that is unexpected, involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population, and demands immediate response" (Marine Mammal Commission 2015a, 103). The formal designation emphasized the anomalous nature of this incident and the importance of scientific investigation. Specialists proposed that the strandings were part of a worrying overall decline in the population of around a third; the species was believed to have only just recovered to pre-whaling numbers. Having reached a peak population of approximately 26,635 in 1997/8, by 2002 this had dropped to an estimated 17,500 (McLean 2002). Although the strandings represented a small percentage of the die-off, these signs of serious trouble triggered alarm amongst the scientific community and wider society in these Pacific coastal regions (Gulland et al. 2005, 2; Hogan and Peterson 2003, 89, 90-91, 256).

Taking an interdisciplinary approach that synthesises perspectives from the environmental humanities with scientific research, this article investigates the complex of scientific and wider societal responses to and understandings of the 1999-2000 gray whale UME. It considers the ways in which both scientists and lay people have sought answers to the mortality event as well as what the strandings reveal about the species, cause (or causes) of death and the impact of human activity on cetaceans and the ocean more widely. As Latour contends, there are phenomena that are "too social and too narrated to be truly natural"; human responses to whale strandings exemplify this "double construction" (1993, 6). Creative responses to the gray whale and also the UME will be analysed, highlighting the ways in which their observations are informed by and diverge from contemporary scientific information. The two key texts are Dick Russell's Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia (2001) and Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey (2003) by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson, both written at the time of the mortality event between 1999 and 2000. By taking a cross-disciplinary approach, I address the ways in which scientific knowledge changes over time and what the implications of this might be for the management of marine mammal populations. Moreover, I consider what this shifting knowledge might mean for more popular understandings and, in turn, the ways wider societal perceptions are reflected in specialist research and co-shape representations of gray whales.

Table 1.

Total gray whale stranding reports, 1995-2002 (table adapted from Gulland et al. 2005, 8-29)

From Whaling to Whale-hugging

Travelling up to 12,000 miles on a round trip from the winter birthing lagoons of Mexico's Baja California Sur to their Arctic feeding grounds in the Bering and Chukchi seas, gray whales have one of the longest migrations of any mammal. On their journey they pass California, Oregon and Washington, travel along the west coasts of Vancouver Island, Canada, and Alaska, and eventually cross through the Unimak Pass to reach their summer grounds. Along this expansive coastline, the gray whale was twice hunted to the point of extinction, first in the mid-nineteenth-century and later in the early twentieth century (Ellis 1991, 242-244; Dedina 2000, 19-24, 26). The first period of whaling, which was dominated by the endeavours of notorious whaler cum naturalist, Charles Melville Scammon, resulted in this species' almost total decimation. It is the most infamous, focusing as it did on the Mexican birthing lagoons where the gray whales come to give birth, nurse their young [End Page...