ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2007
DNA evidence for historic population size and past ecosystem impacts of gray whales.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers.
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47 citing papers in PubMed.
- Kinematics of gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) foraging on infaunal ghost shrimp (Neotrypaea californiensis).The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Genomic signatures of migratory preference and historical whaling in eastern South Pacific humpback whales.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The genomic footprint of whaling and isolation in fin whale populations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Historical Mitogenomic Diversity and Population Structuring of Southern Hemisphere Fin Whales.Genes · 2023Article
- Environmental variables and machine learning models to predict cetacean abundance in the Central-eastern Mediterranean Sea.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Retrospective genomics highlights changes in genetic composition of tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier) and potential loss of a south-eastern Australia population.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Alignment of ordinal and quantitative species abundance and size indices for the detection of shifting baseline syndrome.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2021Article
- What do we know about the fossil record of pinnipeds? A historiographical investigation.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Long-term isolation at a low effective population size greatly reduced genetic diversity in Gulf of California fin whales.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Genetic signatures of small effective population sizes and demographic declines in an endangered rattlesnake,Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Howling from the past: historical phylogeography and diversity losses in European grey wolves.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- The inference of gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) historical population attributes from whole-genome sequences.BMC evolutionary biology · 2018Article
- Effects of sea ice on Arctic biota: an emerging crisis discipline.Biology letters · 2018Review
- What factors shape genetic diversity in cetaceans?Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Effective population size and the genetic consequences of commercial whaling on the humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) from Southwestern Atlantic Ocean.Genetics and molecular biology · 2018Article
- Collateral damage to marine and terrestrial ecosystems from Yankee whaling in the 19th century.Ecology and evolution · 2016Article
- Low genetic diversity and recent demographic expansion in the red starfish Echinaster sepositus (Retzius 1816).Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Barcoding the largest animals on Earth: ongoing challenges and molecular solutions in the taxonomic identification of ancient cetaceans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- An integrated approach to historical population assessment of the great whales: case of the New Zealand southern right whale.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
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Abstract
Ecosystem restoration may require returning threatened populations of ecologically pivotal species to near their former abundances, but it is often difficult to estimate historic population size of species that have been heavily exploited. Eastern Pacific gray whales play a key ecological role in their Arctic feeding grounds and are widely thought to have returned to their prewhaling abundance. Recent mortality spikes might signal that the population has reached long-term carrying capacity, but an alternative is that this decline was due to shifting climatic conditions on Arctic feeding grounds. We used a genetic approach to estimate prewhaling abundance of gray whales and report DNA variability at 10 loci that is typical of a population of approximately 76,000-118,000 individuals, approximately three to five times more numerous than today's average census size of 22,000. Coalescent simulations indicate these estimates may include the entire Pacific metapopulation, suggesting that our average measurement of approximately 96,000 individuals was probably distributed between the eastern and currently endangered western Pacific populations. These levels of genetic variation suggest the eastern population is at most at 28-56% of its historical abundance and should be considered depleted. If used to inform management, this would halve acceptable human-caused mortality for this population from 417 to 208 per year. Potentially profound ecosystem impacts may have resulted from a decline from 96,000 gray whales to the current population. At previous levels, gray whales may have seasonally resuspended 700 million cubic meters of sediment, as much as 12 Yukon Rivers, and provided food to a million sea birds.
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