Baja California is both a seasonal refuge and a point of departure for migrating whales: gray whales and humpbacks spend the winter in its waters before heading north, and San Ignacio Lagoon is identified as the last undeveloped nursery and breeding ground for the Pacific gray whale. In the novel’s widening ecological crisis, this habitat is not a remote backdrop but part of a connected marine world—one increasingly exposed to human disturbance and industrial development.

Winter refuge and migration

The whales’ movement links Baja California to distant feeding grounds. Gray whales leave its lagoons, while humpbacks also winter in warm waters farther south, including Hawaii; in February, both species begin their northward migration. Their round trip spans about 16,000 kilometres, passing through the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea toward the Chukchi Sea, where they feed near the edge of the pack ice on amphipods and krill. When the days shorten, they turn south again, returning toward Mexico to give birth beyond the reach of their principal predator.

The migration makes the waters off British Columbia a seasonal passage rather than an isolated destination. Vast groups of whales pass Vancouver Island twice a year, but the expected movement falters in the year the story begins. Later, investigators identify whales in attack footage as transients: a gray whale and two humpbacks that had spent the winter in Baja California. Photographs of their flukes, checked against records from Seattle, confirm that these individuals had been seen there repeatedly in recent years. Their seasonal link to Baja helps distinguish these newcomers from other whale populations in the investigation.

Feeding after the journey

The journey north is especially demanding because the whales arrive at their feeding grounds after months without eating. Gray whales and humpbacks usually reach Vancouver at the beginning of March; during winter, gray whales in Baja California rely on blubber, but that reserve cannot sustain them indefinitely. Nor can they simply feed farther offshore: the food they need is scarce there.

Wickaninnish Bay offers gray whales a particular source of nourishment unavailable in the open ocean: the marine worm Onuphis elegans. Baja California’s importance therefore extends beyond shelter or breeding. It forms one end of a cycle in which whales fast through winter, migrate north, and resume feeding in specific coastal waters.

San Ignacio Lagoon under pressure

In 1993, San Ignacio Lagoon was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was described as the world’s last undeveloped nursery and breeding ground for the Pacific gray whale, as well as habitat for numerous endangered plant and animal species. Its value rests not only on the presence of whales but on the ecological continuity of a place where they can reproduce without the proposed transformation of the lagoon’s surroundings.

Despite that status, Mitsubishi Corporation planned a salt-evaporation plant that would pump 20,000 litres of salt water from the lagoon every second and create 116 square miles of salt ponds. The water would then flow back as wastewater, whose effects on the whales were unknown. Scientists, environmentalists, and Nobel Prize winners protested the proposal, which also threatened to establish a precedent for industrial development in protected habitat.

Place in the wider crisis

Baja California’s significance is revealed through the consequences of its connections: whales that winter there later appear in a crisis unfolding off Vancouver Island, and their feeding and breeding depend on distinct habitats along a vast migration route. The proposed salt works sharpen the contrast between the lagoon as a living nursery and the industrial systems seeking to remake it. The novel’s ecological perspective treats harm to such a place as more than a local disturbance: what changes in one part of the whales’ world may affect the wider web of life on which they depend.