Talk:Gray whale

Moved content from Whale to be merged

California Gray Whale: It belongs to the Order Baleen therefore it is a filter feeder. It can be 35 to 40 feet long, has a cigar-shaped body, and its color is dark with white patches. It has no dorsal fin but has a ridge on its back formed by a row of knuckles. Its flukes are braod and can be up to 10 feet across. The females give birth to babies up to 15 feet long. It typically migrates in the months of June and October to the north in the Berling and Chukchi Seas. It eats krill and Squid in the Northern seas. It migrates south in Autumn at a speed to 5 to 6 m.p.h for 6,000 miles to Baja, California. Thenit migrates back notth around April to the Artic region.

I think this is all covered now. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:38, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Gray Whales actually are hunted

Although many published accounts state that gray whales have not been hunted since the IWC banned commercial whaling, in fact hunting of gray whales has continued on a limited basis since the 1940s, under the Soviet Union's (later, Russia's) exception to the commercial hunting ban for "native/subsistence purposes." Specifically, the Chuckchee people of eastern Siberia have hunted the whales, ostensibly as part of their cultural tradition of hunting and eating whales. There has also been a (much smaller) hunt of gray whales conducted by native peoples on the west coast of North America in recent years.

Both hunts have been subject to periodic protests by those opposed to whaling. In the 1980s, the organization Greenpeace staged a "raid" on a Siberian settlement, announcing to reporters afterwards that they had obtained evidence that the facility was actually using the whale meat to feed fur animals being raised on a large-scale fur-farming operation. Reviewing the history of the annual Russian gray whale catch shows that the number of whales taken increased dramatically during the years when "collective farming" was introduced to the area by Stalin during the 1940s, and has remained high since then. Although Russian authorities denied in the 1980s that whale meat was being fed to fur animals, they reversed themselves in recent years and admitted that that was, in fact, happening (though continuing to claim that this should be allowed under the "aboriginal/subsistence whaling" exception to the IWC's commercial whaling ban).

I'll try to dig up some actual sources on this, and update the page, over the next few weeks.

-- John Callender 18:40, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks John. Data on this would be very interesting. It would also be relevant to Aboriginal whaling#Russian whaling - all we currently have there is Russians in the remote east Siberian province of Chukotka are permitted to take up to 140 Gray Whales from the North-East Pacific population each year. Pcb21| Pete 19:31, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Required: Shell controversy

This article needs to talk about the Shell Kamchatka oil drilling controversy that has been in the news over the last few months. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)No never

Conservation status

What is the grey whale's conservation status? It says low risk here, but the highest risk over at whaling

I've had the same question - A BBC article says that they are critical so I've changed it. Apologies if this is wrong. Smartse (talk) 20:19, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

The Western population is critically endangered, but the species as a whole is least concern since the eastern population (e.g. the population that migrates between Alaska and Mexico) has "probably reached a size where it exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment in years where food availability is below average and is likely to fluctuate around some environmentally determined average level (IWC 2003)." See the IUCN page for the species http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/full/8097/0 and for the western population that is the subject of the BBC article http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/full/8099/0 . Rlendog (talk) 20:27, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Failing Good Article

I've assessed the article against the Good Article criteria and regrettably had to fail it. The principal reasons are as follows:

• The 'physical description' is markedly incomplete. I'm sure more could be added to other sections (see Blue Whale for a very complete whale species article), but this is the main area where the article falls short in terms of content.
• The article is insufficiently referenced. A good number of references, and preferably inline citations, must be added for this article to become a Good Article. As it stands, virtually none of the main points of the article are verifiable.

Regards, The Land 19:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Oligocene?!?!?!

hi people!!!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.148.53.200 (talk)
Well, I don't know who wrote it, but it contradicts every source I have here: According to the Encyclopedia of mammals, the gray whales exist only from the middle of the Miocene. According to "Cladistic analysis and a revised classification of fossil and recent mysticetes", METTE ELSTRUP STEEMAN, 2005, the gray whales speciated after the Balaenidae. Oldest? Oligocene? It certainly needs sourcing. Yaron from the hebrew wikipedia, 11:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.155.181.22 (talk)

Yeah - 30 million years old for this particular species seems way out of the range of possibility. The oldest of the Mysticetes seem to date back to 34 million years ago, http://www.kanazawa-med.ac.jp/~hum-sci/Fordyce.htm, and I don't see any evidence that suggests they should be considered the same species as Gray Whales. I'm going to delete that portion of the article - if someone would like to put it back up, please provide a citation. Wevets (talk) 20:40, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

According to The Paleobiology Database, Eschrichtidae as a family only appeared in the Burdigalian; and the modern Gray Whale species didn't appear until the Pleistocene. That fossil range is definitely wrong, I'm going to change it. Leptictidium (mt) 18:41, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm studying Whales Of The World by Nigel Bonner (ISBN 0-7137-2369-6, 1998 reprint) who states "Some people have thought there are direct links between the Oligocene cetotheres and present-day grey whales, but this is a misconception. In fact, we can trace the origin of grey whales back no further than the Pleistocene era." LEXsample (talk) 13:13, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Put up the references yourself, I don't feel like learning how

Yeah, I don’t feel like putting references. My sources are Gaze (1936), Henderson (1972), Tonnessen and Johnsen (1982), Kasuya (2002), Weller et al (2002), Brownell and Swartz (2007), and some others I don’t feel like typing. Oh, and Brownell and Swartz estimates on how many gray whales the California took are way off, so I didn't bother use them. Jonas Poole (talk) 23:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Which century is correct?

Two different centuries are given by the article for the time of extinction of the N. Atlantic grey whales. The intro says 18th; in the section on Population, it says the 17th. Hello...? I would assume that the former is correct, as I am not aware of any large-scale whaling in the Atlantic in the 1600's. Somebody ought to get on this. It's the kind of thing that (all too often, unfortunately) gives Wikipedia a poor reputation.--Gregapan (talk) 22:32, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

In Bryant's work on North Atlantic gray whales (cited in the article), he says gray whales existed in the North Atlantic until the 17th or 18th century. He cites Dudley's Natural History of Whales (1725) for the latter date, which gives a description of what appears to be a gray whale. Dudley's Natural History is available on Jstor. Jonas Poole (talk) 00:34, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and there was large-scale whaling in the North Atlantic during this time, but only in the Arctic. In the 1680s the Dutch alone had as many as 250 whaleships. Jonas Poole (talk) 00:36, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry - I'm not clear on what you're saying - are you saying there was no large-scale whaling in the non-Arctic portions of the North Atlantic in the 17th century? I was under the impression that the Basques and others engaged in non-Arctic whaling during that time period. Wevets (talk) 14:16, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I haven't been on this page for awhile. I don't consider shore whaling in the Bay of Biscay (during this century, at least) or sending a few dozen ships to Labrador or elsewhere south of 66 degrees to be large-scale. Perhaps you do? I'm confused as well. You said there was no large-scale whaling in the North Atlantic in the 17th century, but now you say there was, in particular by the Basques? Did you discover this before or after my statement? Jonas Poole (talk) 23:04, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Or for that matter, shore whaling off the east coast of the United States late in the century, which was very small-scale compared to Dutch whaling in the Arctic during the same decades (1650s-1690s). Jonas Poole (talk) 23:06, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you have confused me with Gregapan. Wevets (talk) 06:08, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe I have as well. Perhaps I should check sigs first? Jonas Poole (talk) 03:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Couldn't hurt, but it doesn't matter now - I see what you're saying - that the Basques 20-50 ships don't count as large-scale compared to the 250 ships of the Dutch and more from other nations. I am actually more interested in large-scale in terms of impact on the population, which, as it turns out, we don't have any really good information on at this time. Obviously it had a large impact on the Grey Whale population, they were driven to extinction with whaling as a contributing factor to some degree or other. I'm curious as to whether other species were driven to extinction or near-extinction in the Arctic at the time.Wevets (talk) 02:27, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

One of the many problems are cuased by the fact that the eastern Atlantic (i.e. European) Population seems to have died out earlier than the western Atlantic (i.e. American). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Escier (talk • contribs) 22:30, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Move paragraph for clarity

Hi All,

it seem this paragraph in the migration section:

By late March or early April a number of Gray Whales enter Puget Sound and may be seen from Canada as far south as Everett, Washington near the mouth of the Snohomish River.

would be better suited as the second to last paragraph in same section.

Agree?

-rudyard (talk) 05:26, 7 November 2009 (UTC)