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Eastern North Pacific gray whales migrating north off the central California coast: A photo-identification catalog of mother-calf pairs 2012-2019
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2024
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[PDF-12.04 MB]
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Description:The majority of eastern North Pacific gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) annually migrate southward from summer feeding grounds in the Pacific Arctic to wintering areas off Baja California, Mexico (Rice and Wolman, 1971). Both the southward and northward migration are segregated, to a large extent, by age, sex and reproductive condition. During the northward migration, females with their calves of the year are the last to depart the Baja wintering areas. These mother-calf pairs are observed on the migration route between late March and late May and typically arrive to the summer feeding grounds sometime between May and June. Between 1994 and 2023, shore-based counts of northbound gray whale calves have been conducted each spring by NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center off central California (Fig. 1) and the results most recently published in Stewart and Weller (2021) and Eguchi et al. (2023). Between 2012 and 2019, shore-based photo-identification efforts of mother-calf pairs were carried out simultaneously with the visual survey and the images collected are represented in this catalog of identified individuals.
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Rights Information:CC0 Public Domain
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