The smaller size could have major consequences for the health and reproductive success of the affected whales, and also raises alarm bells about the state of the food web in which they coexist, researchers say.

“This could be an early warning sign that the abundance of this population is starting to decline, or is not healthy,” said K.C. Bierlich, co-author on the study and an assistant professor at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute in Newport. “And whales are considered ecosystem sentinels, so if the whale population isn’t doing well, that might say a lot about the environment itself.”

The study, published in Global Change Biology, looked at the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG), a small subset of about 200 gray whales within the larger Eastern North Pacific (ENP) population of around 14,500. This subgroup stays closer to shore along the Oregon coast, feeding in shallower, warmer waters than the Arctic seas where the bulk of the gray whale population spends most of the year.

Recent studies from OSU have shown that whales in this subgroup are smaller and in overall worse body condition than their ENP counterparts. The current study reveals that they’ve been getting smaller in recent decades.

The Marine Mammal Institute’s Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna (GEMM) Lab has been studying this subgroup of gray whales since 2016, including flying drones over the whales to measure their size. Using images from 2016-2022 of 130 individual whales with known or estimated age, researchers determined that a full-grown gray whale born in 2020 is expected to reach an adult body length that is 1.65 meters (about 5 feet, 5 inches) shorter than a gray whale born prior to 2000. For PCFG gray whales that grow to be 38-41 feet long at full maturity, that accounts for a loss of more than 13% of their total length.

If the same trend were to happen in humans, that would be like the height of the average American woman shrinking from 5 feet, 4 inches to 4 feet, 8 inches tall over the course of 20 years.

“In general, size is critical for animals,” said Enrico Pirotta, lead author on the study and a researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “It affects their behavior, their physiology, their life history, and it has cascading effects for the animals and for the community they’re a part of.”

Whale calves that are smaller at weaning age may be unable to cope with the uncertainty that comes with being newly independent, which can affect survival rates, Pirotta said.

For adult gray whales, one of the biggest concerns is reproductive success.

“With them being smaller, there are questions of how effectively these PCFG gray whales can store and allocate energy toward growing and maintaining their health. Importantly, are they able to put enough energy toward reproduction and keep the population growing?” Bierlich said.

Scarring on PCFG whales from boat strikes and fishing gear entanglement also makes the team concerned that smaller body size with lower energy reserves may make the whales less resilient to injuries.

The study also examined the patterns of the ocean environment that likely regulate food availability for these gray whales off the Pacific coast by tracking cycles of “upwelling” and “relaxation” in the ocean. Upwelling sweeps nutrients from deeper to shallower regions, while relaxation periods then allow those nutrients to remain in shallower areas where light allows for growth of plankton and other tiny organisms, including the prey of gray whales.

“Without a balance between upwelling and relaxation, the ecosystem may not be able to produce enough prey to support the large size of these gray whales,” said co-author Leigh Torres, associate professor and director of the GEMM Lab at OSU.

The data show that whale size declined concurrently with changes in the balance between upwelling and relaxation, Pirotta said.

“We haven’t looked specifically at how climate change is affecting these patterns, but in general we know that climate change is affecting the oceanography of the Northeast Pacific through changes in wind patterns and water temperature,” he said. “And these factors and others affect the dynamics of upwelling and relaxation in the area.”

Now that they know the PCFG gray whales’ body size is declining, researchers say they have a lot of new questions about downstream consequences of that decline and the factors that could be contributing to it.

“We’re heading into our ninth field season studying this PCFG subgroup,” Bierlich said. “This is a powerful dataset that allows us to detect changes in body condition each year, so now we’re examining the environmental drivers of those changes.”

The other co-authors on the paper were Lisa Hildebrand, Clara Bird and Alejandro Ajó at OSU and Leslie New at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Led by scientists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), the study published June 11 in Earth’s Future. By identifying agricultural communities considered at-risk from looming changes in snowfall and snowmelt patterns, the researchers found that water conservation measures like changes in crop type and extent were more stable adaptive strategies than changes to reservoir capacity. By the end of the century, many areas could have less than half the water they have historically relied on to refill their reservoirs, but changing the types and extent of their crops could help by restoring an average of about 20% of reservoir capacity.

The research team included scientists with the diversity of expertise needed to capture the complexities of water systems while balancing concerns for locally focused adaptation. Beatrice Gordon, lead author of the study and sociohydrologist and postdoctoral researcher at DRI, says the research is needed to inform water management at the local level, where most decisions are made. Gordon herself grew up on a ranch in Wyoming, where she learned firsthand the challenges that face water-insecure communities — an experience that helped lead to her research focus on agriculture and water in the Western U.S.

“A lot of decisions about water are made at the local level, but there’s this big disconnect between that reality and the macro-scale level of most research on this topic,” Gordon says. “We really wanted to understand what the future could look like at the scale that most communities manage their water resources. What are the levers that folks in these communities have when it comes to a future with less snow?”

Mountain snowpacks have historically acted as nature’s water towers across much of the region by storing winter precipitation and releasing it downstream during drier months. Water management systems were designed with this process in mind, but climate change is altering snowmelt patterns in ways that will make it difficult for existing systems to meet the needs of downstream water users. As the world’s largest user of freshwater, irrigated agriculture is at particularly high risk from these changes.

Strategies for addressing water shortages that focus on augmenting supply include expanding reservoirs and replenishing groundwater with surplus water, but these approaches become less effective as the timing and availability of precipitation become more unpredictable. In contrast, water conservation strategies such as reducing total crop acreage, periodic crop fallowing, and shifting toward higher value crops can help manage these risks.

To find out how risk management practices could work on a community-level scale, the researchers built a comprehensive risk assessment framework based on guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For each of 13 communities, they gathered historical data on irrigation water supply, agricultural water demand, snow storage and snowmelt patterns, and more. They then used projections for the future climate through 2100 to understand how supply and demand dynamics may change in the near future.

“We gathered all these data together and looked at the picture of risk, and then also the ways that adaptation could reduce risk,” Gordon says. “Our goal was really to make this as relevant as possible for the people who are actually making decisions on the ground.”

“Dr. Gordon assembled a very impressive and unprecedented dataset for this paper linking agricultural water supply and demand across the Western United States,” says study co-author Gabrielle Boisramé, assistant research professor at DRI.

The Western agricultural communities the researchers selected are located in headwaters areas, making them both subject to significant changes in future climate and sentinels for the future of the West. Several of them are located in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which feeds into the main stem of the river — a water system that supports more than 40 million people.

“A lot of these areas are providing downstream water to other communities,” Gordon says. “So, if they have an increase in demand and a decrease in supply, it impacts not only that area, but also the areas that rely on that water downstream.”

The study results show that there will be a stark decline in how much many of these communities will be able to refill their reservoirs in just a few decades, with some seeing declines to about half of the water they were historically able to store. A drop that significant is particularly acute in many of the smaller reservoirs that can only hold about a year’s worth of water.

“It shows how important it is to dedicate effort — now, not in 20 to 50 years — to figuring out how we, as scientists, can provide better information about water conservation,” Gordon says. “And I think that there’s an opportunity to really think about how we support communities in these efforts, especially small communities in headwaters regions that might be fully dependent on agriculture.”

“Our results indicate the importance of water conservation as an adaptive strategy in a warmer future with less snow,” she continues. “And that’s broadly true across a lot of different places in the Western U.S.”

The study does not prove that delivery of a low-birth-weight infant causes memory and thinking problems. It only shows an association.

“Previous research has shown that people who have had a low-birth-weight delivery have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure,” said study author Diana C. Soria-Contreras, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “Our study found that a history of having a child with a low birth weight may also be a marker of poorer cognition later in life.”

The study involved 15,323 female participants with an average age of 62 at completion of thinking and memory tests. All the participants had at least one birth. Of the total participants, 1,224 people, or 8%, had a history of low-birth-weight delivery. Low birth weight was defined as less than 5.5 pounds for pregnancies lasting more than 20 weeks.

Participants completed a questionnaire about their pregnancy complications, birth outcomes, birth weight and other information.

They also completed a series of thinking and memory tests.

Researchers then combined average scores of the two tests of participants’ memory and ability to quickly and accurately respond to a situation as well as the two tests of learning and working memory. Higher scores indicated better memory and thinking. On average, the difference in scores between those with and without a low-birth-weight delivery was -0.06 for speed and attention tests and -0.05 for learning and working memory. This is comparable to the difference associated with one to two additional years of age in this population.

The results were similar after researchers adjusted for factors that could affect both birth weight and cognitive function, such as age, smoking status and high blood pressure. The results were also similar when researchers did not include people with premature deliveries, pregnancies with twins or other multiples or those affected by pregnancy-related high blood pressure disorders.

In addition, they found that the more low-birth-weight deliveries people had, the lower their scores were.

“Future research is needed to confirm our findings and to look at whether screening women with a history of low-birth-weight deliveries for cognitive issues and taking steps to promote their brain health could help prevent or delay cognitive impairment and dementia later on,” Soria-Contreras said.

A limitation of the study is that most of the participants were non-Hispanic white people, so results may not be generalizable to other populations.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institute on Aging and the Office of Research on Women’s Health.