Gray whales involved in attacks and rescues

Gray whales involved in attacks and rescues are among the most recognizable seasonal inhabitants of the Pacific waters off Vancouver Island, but their place in the story shifts from expected wildlife to troubling mystery. Their long absence empties whale-watching trips and alarms Leon Anawak; their return brings both a close encounter that makes him feel examined and a striking episode in which resident whales seem to hold attacking migrants at bay. Later, the whale Lucy becomes the focus of tracking that records an abrupt departure from ordinary feeding and migration patterns.

Migration, Feeding, and Seasonal Absence

Gray whales undertake a vast seasonal journey between wintering and feeding grounds. In February, they leave the lagoons of Baja California and the warm waters of Hawaii, travelling roughly sixteen thousand kilometres through the Pacific toward the Arctic and the Chukchi Sea. There they feed near the pack ice on amphipods and krill. When the days shorten, they return toward Mexico to give birth beyond the reach of orcas. Twice a year, large numbers pass through British Columbia and the waters around Vancouver Island, supporting whale-watching businesses in coastal towns such as Tofino.

The whales’ feeding needs help explain why the coastal route matters. In Wickaninnish Bay, gray whales find Onuphis elegans, a long, thin worm living in sandy seabed. The worms provide a source of nutrition that the whales cannot obtain in the same way out in the ocean, and the whales depend on such feeding stops to sustain the journey north. The migration is therefore not simply a passage between distant destinations: it relies on particular coastal feeding grounds along the way.

One early whale-watching trip makes the absence palpable. In persistent rain, Leon Anawak takes a fully loaded Zodiac out from the Blue Shark with twelve passengers, all waiting for a glimpse of whales. After more than an hour and a half, they have seen none. A missed sighting is ordinary enough; a whole day without one is bad luck, while a week without whales would be unprecedented. Davie's Whaling Station even offers repeat trips when customers see no whales. The visitors put away their cameras, but Anawak’s concern is not merely for the disappointed passengers. The expected animals seem to have gone astray.

The absence has ecological and historical weight. In the mid-1980s, gray whales were so depleted by hunting that few stopped at the coast. Their numbers later recovered, but the world population is estimated at only about twenty thousand. Anawak expects most of them to be in the region during the migration season. When they do not appear, their failure to arrive reads as a warning about a population whose recovery does not make it immune to disruption.

Return and Unsettling Encounters

By 5 April, business is picking up again at Davie's Whaling Station. Gray whales, humpbacks, orcas, and even some minke whales are returning. Their reappearance is what Anawak had hoped for, yet it does not settle his questions about how the whales disappeared or evaded satellites and probes. He remembers an earlier encounter with two humpbacks that seemed to examine him with cool thoroughness. The experience leaves him entertaining the absurd possibility that they were spies, while recognizing that he has no answer for what they might have been seeking.

A later sighting restores the ordinary wonder of whale-watching without making the broader crisis disappear. Gray whales swim close to a boat, briefly raising their heads above the surface. Their mottled skin and powerful jaws are covered with barnacles, copepods, and whale lice. Some passengers film and photograph them; others watch in silence. Anawak has seen grown men cry when a whale rises from the water. The scene shows the attraction of the animals at close range, while the surrounding investigation gives that familiar spectacle a new unease.

The distinction between resident whales and migrants becomes central to interpreting attacks. In discussing the evidence with Alicia Delaware, Anawak identifies the gray whale and two humpbacks seen in attack footage as transients: photographs of their flukes have been checked against records from Seattle, confirming that the animals had been seen in Baja California in recent years. The Johnstone Strait, by contrast, had been free of attacks despite the kayaks there. Anawak suspects that the danger comes from transient whales and possibly offshore orcas, rather than from every member of the species.

The Lady Wexham and the Resident Whales

During the effort to get people off the sinking Lady Wexham, a group of gray whales tries to ram the rescuers. Leon Anawak believes that the situation may be fatal before two more gray whales appear and lie alongside them. The attackers back off. The newcomers are residents: roughly a dozen gray whales remain on the west coast all year, too old for the arduous migration. One of the two is an elderly local whale.

Anawak is cautious about calling the encounter a rescue. He cannot establish that the residents deliberately protected the people; what he can report is that they seemed to keep the attackers at bay and were not acting like those assailants. Delaware connects the episode with the larger pattern: many whales vanished while travelling across the Pacific from California, while aggressive orcas were also found in the open ocean. Their working inference is that migrants are affected and resident whales remain harmless. It is a consequential distinction, but still an inference from observed behavior, not an explanation of its cause.

The episode complicates the meaning of the animals’ apparent aggression. The same species includes attackers and whales whose presence may have interrupted an attack; the residents’ behavior resists a simple account in which every whale poses the same threat. Anawak and Delaware do not claim certainty about what the whales intended. Instead, they treat the difference between migrants and residents as a clue pointing away from the coast and toward the open sea, where the change in behavior may have begun.

Lucy: Feeding, Attack, and Departure

Lucy, a gray whale fourteen metres long, is identified after hurling herself against the Lady Wexham. Leon Ford cannot know whether she was responsible for splitting the vessel’s thin hull, but she is a concrete link between the attacks and the investigation of individual whales. When Ford later watches her from an observation lab using footage from the URA dive robot, she does not initially appear to be rampaging. She feeds alongside about half a dozen adult gray whales and two adolescents, moving through seaweed and sandy silt, stirring up sediment as she catches worms and amphipods.

The footage offers a view of behavior that surface observation cannot provide. Gray whales feed by diving to the seabed, rolling onto their sides, and vacuuming up bottom-dwelling organisms, including small crustaceans, plankton, and tube worms. Their feeding has furrowed the seabed near Vancouver Island. The whales favor shallows, and Lucy comes close enough to shore that most of the images are taken in less than thirty metres of water. For hours, the URA follows the rhythm of her surfacing to breathe and returning to the bottom.

Then the depth readings change. The probe has recorded between zero and thirty metres, but now registers forty and then fifty as Lucy heads toward open water and dives increasingly deeply. The other whales follow at migration speed. Ford recognizes the change as anomalous: gray whales ordinarily feed on benthic organisms and, even when migrating, stay within two kilometres of the coast. They do not normally descend below 120 metres, making the recorded course toward 300 metres difficult to reconcile with their usual habits. A brief green flash appears at the bottom of the grid and is identified as a spectrogram, the visual representation of a sound wave; the observation supplies no confirmed explanation for either the signal or the whales’ sudden movement.

Significance

The gray whales’ story is organized around the limits of observation. Their seasonal route is known in broad outline, their feeding behavior can be watched in the shallows, and individual animals such as Lucy can be identified. Yet the disappearance, evasion of tracking systems, attacks, and abrupt movement into deeper water remain only partly understood. The whales are not a single, predictable mass: migrants and year-round residents behave differently, and one observed encounter can suggest protection without proving intention.

That uncertainty also changes how the sea functions in the investigation. At the surface, a whale-watching trip depends on the appearance of familiar animals; beneath it, the URA reveals feeding furrows, descending bodies, and movements beyond the depths they ordinarily occupy. The evidence points from the coast toward the open ocean, but does not yet reveal what has altered the migrants’ behavior. Gray whales thus mark both the scale of the ecological disturbance and the difficulty of interpreting it: they are visible enough to inspire close study, yet their lives and movements exceed what observers can securely explain.