The eastern North Pacific gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) population is considered “recovered” since the days of commercial whaling, with a population of over 25,000 animals. However, gray whale habitat is changing rapidly due to urbanization of the migratory coastal corridor, increases in shipping, and climate change altering water conditions and prey distribution. Increased single strandings and intermittent large-scale mortality events have occurred over the past 20 years, raising questions about how gray whale health is affected by whale population size (density dependence), climate change, and coastal development. To understand the impacts of these factors on health and the role of health changes in whale population dynamics, increased understanding of the pathogenesis and epidemiology of diseases in gray whales is needed. To date, most information on gray whale health and disease is in single case reports, in sections of larger papers on whale ecology, or in technical memoranda and conference proceedings. Here we review existing data on gray whale health and disease to provide a synthesis of available information and a baseline for future studies, and suggest priorities for future study of gray whale health. The latter include nutritional studies to distinguish annual physiological fasting from starvation leading to mortality, identification of endemic and novel viruses through increased use of molecular techniques, quantifying parasitic infections to explore interactions among prey shifts and parasite infection and body condition, as well as enhancing necropsy efforts to identify stochastic causes of mortality such as vessel strikes, entanglements, and predation. Integration of health and disease studies on individual animals with population monitoring and models of whale/prey dynamics will require interdisciplinary approaches to understand the role of health changes in population dynamics of this coastal whale.

中文翻译：

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灰鲸 (Eschrichtiusrobustus) 健康与疾病：回顾和未来方向

自商业捕鲸时代以来，北太平洋东部灰鲸 (Eschrichtiusrobustus) 种群被认为是“恢复”的，其种群数量超过 25,000 只。然而，由于迁徙沿海走廊的城市化、航运的增加以及气候变化改变了水域条件和猎物分布，灰鲸栖息地正在迅速变化。在过去的 20 年中，单搁浅和间歇性的大规模死亡事件不断增加，引发了关于灰鲸健康如何受到鲸鱼种群规模（密度依赖性）、气候变化和沿海发展的影响的问题。为了了解这些因素对健康的影响以及健康变化在鲸鱼种群动态中的作用，需要进一步了解灰鲸疾病的发病机制和流行病学。迄今为止，大多数关于灰鲸健康和疾病的信息都在单个病例报告中、在鲸鱼生态学的大型论文的章节中，或者在技术备忘录和会议记录中。在这里，我们回顾了有关灰鲸健康和疾病的现有数据，以提供可用信息的综合和未来研究的基线，并提出未来灰鲸健康研究的优先事项。后者包括营养研究，以区分每年的生理禁食与导致死亡的饥饿，通过增加使用分子技术来识别地方性和新型病毒，量化寄生虫感染以探索猎物转移和寄生虫感染与身体状况之间的相互作用，以及加强尸检努力确定死亡的随机原因，例如船只撞击、缠结和捕食。