Newborn calves are 16 feet and 1500 pounds. Gray whales are bottom-feeders, laying on their sides and filtering crustaceans through their hairy baleen plates. Their only predators are killer whales and man.
Many gray whales have scars from past battles with killer whales. In the 1800’s and 1900’s, gray whales were hunted almost to extinction (only a few hundred to a few thousand were left). The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1946 protected the whales so that they now number 16,000 to 20,000.
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