#Hazen: WHY BARBIE?!

[deadeyemarkxman]

Screaming as he's being dragged away by Scourge to watch Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper.

[rjzimmerman]

Officials examine a decomposing whale that washed ashore, Tuesday, May 28, 2019, in Port Ludlow, Washington. (Photo: Mario Rivera, AP)

Barbie Halaska, center, necropsy manager with The Marine Mammal Center, talks to beachgoers about a dead juvenile Gray Whale on Limantour Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore on May 25, 2019, in Point Reyes Station, Calif. Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Excerpt from this USA Today story:

Something killed 121 gray whales this spring and summer, and scientists are struggling to find out what it was.

The dead giants of the ocean washed up on West Coast beaches as they finished their annual epic migration to their winter feeding grounds between Alaska and Russia. Many were emaciated and appeared to be starving.

The near-final death count, tallied this week, makes this the second-worst year on record for gray whales, which were hunted almost to extinction in the late 1800s. It could represent as much as 10% of the species' total population.

Research teams are working to understand why so many have been found dead and what it means for the species as a whole.

“Your immediate tendency is to look at the food supply, because of the fact that so many are emaciated,” said John Calambokidis, a cetacean expert with Cascadia Research in Olympia, Washington, a nonprofit organization that focuses on whale research. "But we don't know enough to be able to say what the cause is yet."

Some scientists speculated that climate change could be one of the reasons behind the change in the whale’s food supply.

Temperatures in the Arctic last winter were among the warmest on record because of climate change, and the amount of sea ice in that region is close to its all-time lowest level, federal scientists announced in a report last year.

There are two ocean heat waves happening in the Pacific, the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave and another in Alaska.

“My understanding is that poor forage is one of the leading hypotheses behind the Unusual Mortality Event. This is likely driven by a combination of climate change and a lack of ocean mixing that is resulting in the large and intense marine heat wave,” said Elliott Hazen, a research ecologist with NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego.