A dolphin girl's unexpected five-year gray whale side quest
- Liah McPherson
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
It's been more than a couple of years since I last posted here. Actually, full transparency, it's been over a year since I came back to MMRP to start my PhD, which means I've been sitting on this "welcome back" post for quite some time. In my defense, I've been busy – let me bring you up to speed.
If you read my first couple of posts on the MMRP blog, you might remember that studying dolphins was my entire personality – I started working with bottlenose dolphins in 2014, as a middle schooler, volunteering with the Outer Banks Center for Dolphin Research. In college, I worked with the Wild Dolphin Project in the Bahamas studying Atlantic spotted dolphins, and eventually ended up here on Oʻahu during COVID to start my master’s degree on spinner dolphin population biology off West Oʻahu with MMRP. Fast forward three years and I defended my master’s thesis (whoop whoop), then took a two year hiatus before beginning my PhD program back at MMRP (I like to say that I’m both the oldest and newest member of the lab). And yet, my dissertation won’t have a single dolphin in it.
A reformed dolphin purist, I’m focusing on gray whales for my PhD. It happened gradually, somewhere between hopping on a boat in 2021 to help with humpback whale drone work in Maui, and peering over the side of a different boat in 2023 to make eye contact with my first gray whale. It happened much faster when I realized how much gray whales are struggling.
The Eastern North Pacific (ENP) population – essentially the last robust gray whale population left on Earth – has declined by almost 50% since 2016, a year characterized by a strong heatwave in the North Pacific. That decline coincided with what NOAA calls an Unusual Mortality Event between 2019 and 2023, when record numbers of gray whales washed ashore along the West Coast, many of them severely underweight. And the trend isn't reversing: researchers monitoring the species' breeding grounds in Mexico have recorded fewer and fewer mother-calf pairs, with 2025 and 2026 representing the lowest numbers on record. It's serious enough that in 2025, the IUCN announced it will reassess gray whales' global conservation status for the first time since the species was considered recovered from whaling back in 1994.
The leading hypothesis is that these whales are likely nutritionally stressed due to cascading effects from environmental change in the North Pacific. Most ENP gray whales feed in the Arctic – primarily in the Bering and Chukchi Seas – where their usual prey sources may be declining in availability and access. But the effects of these changes aren’t just showing up in the Arctic. Across the West Coast of North America, scientists, community members, and others who spend time on the water have been documenting gray whales exploring new areas and, in some cases, trying new prey types. One particularly striking example is Sitka Sound, Alaska, where gray whale numbers have increased nearly ten-fold since 2019.
My PhD will involve working with the Alaska Whale Foundation (AWF) as a graduate research fellow to study how gray whales are using an emerging foraging hotspot in Sitka Sound, Alaska. I first started developing this project with AWF in 2023, and the research has grown into a community-informed effort led by AWF and developed alongside local collaborators. Together, we're trying to understand how important Sitka Sound might be for ENP gray whales, and how they’re impacting Sitka Sound in return.
My work will focus on several pieces of that puzzle, including how many whales are using Sitka Sound, where and when they're foraging, and how their body condition changes throughout the season. Using drones, I’m measuring changes in body size over time, which can help us estimate changes in body mass and ultimately how much energy individual whales are gaining while feeding in the Sound. We're also using Custom Animal Tracking Solutions biologging tags to look at how much energy whales are expending and what they're doing underwater that we can't see from the surface.
Eventually, I hope to be able to put some of those pieces together to better understand what’s happening in Sitka, as well as the energetic costs and benefits of different parts of the gray whale's annual migratory cycle – from feeding in Alaska to migrating south and spending the winter in Mexico. Exactly how much of that we manage to tackle over the course of a five-year PhD remains to be seen, but that's the general idea.
But I already have plenty to work on. In the past two years, we have completed two full field seasons in Sitka Sound, flown hundreds of drone flights over gray whales, deployed nine CATS tags, and hosted eleven fantastic interns who have helped make the whole thing possible. You can read AWF’s 2025 Gray Whale Report here! I've also learned how to program, deploy and retrieve, and begin to analyze data from CATS tags, despite having what can only be described as noodle arms (boy do I make tagging look awkward).
There's still a lot to learn, but we already have some exciting preliminary results, and I'll be presenting some of AWF’s first findings at the Society for Marine Mammalogy's 2026 conference in Puerto Rico this October.
So, it seems that after somewhat of a detour, I’m back at MMRP, back to being a student, and now also a part of the AWF team – proof that my entire dolphin-girl personality can, in fact, be rebranded.
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