We’re Counting the Corpses, Not Measuring the Ocean

Salmon are disappearing, whales are starving and crab harvests are becoming less predictable. We keep counting the casualties—but are we adequately measuring the food web beneath them?

Nearly 150 gray whales were found dead along the Pacific coast of North America during the first half of 2026. Salmon harvests across much of the North Pacific have fallen well short of preseason projections. Washington and Oregon’s Dungeness crab fleets have experienced two seasons well below the extraordinary harvests recorded only a few years ago.

Each problem has its own immediate explanation.

Seals eat salmon. Ships strike whales. Crab seasons are delayed by poor meat recovery, domoic acid and protections intended to prevent whale entanglements.

All of those things are true.

But they may not be the most important truth.

We manage the Pacific Ocean primarily by counting the animals we harvest, protect or find dead. We measure salmon landings, crab landings, whale strandings and seal populations. Far less public attention is paid to the organisms and biological processes that support them: plankton, forage fish, amphipods, benthic invertebrates and the timing, location and nutritional value of marine food production.

In other words, we are carefully measuring the passengers while paying far less attention to the engine.

That does not prove that the Pacific Ocean is collapsing. Natural cycles remain powerful, individual species respond differently and two difficult seasons do not establish a permanent trend. But the growing number of unusual outcomes across different species and regions gives us reason to ask a larger question:

Are we measuring the health of the ocean—or merely documenting its symptoms?

Harvest is not the same as abundance

Commercial harvest numbers are indispensable. They are also incomplete.

A salmon harvest reflects far more than the number of salmon in the ocean. It is influenced by fishing effort, weather, market prices, regulations, fleet capacity, migration timing and where the fish happen to be distributed.

A low harvest can result from low abundance, fewer fishing days or fish arriving somewhere the fleet did not expect. A technologically efficient fleet can also maintain respectable landings temporarily while the underlying population weakens.

Dungeness crab provides a useful example.

Washington’s coastal harvest declined from a record 28.7 million pounds in the 2022–23 season to approximately 16 million pounds in 2024–25. That is a 44% decline, and it was certainly felt by fishermen. Yet the latter season was only about 3% below the previous ten-season average and remained the fifth-highest harvest of the decade.

Both statements are true.

The harvest declined sharply from its recent peak, but the fishery had not necessarily collapsed. Record dockside prices also made 2024–25 one of the most valuable seasons in Washington history.

Harvest data tells us what fishermen landed. It does not, by itself, tell us why abundance, condition, distribution or economic performance changed.

We count the predators because we can see them

In Washington, seals and sea lions have become central characters in the debate over salmon recovery.

They do eat salmon. In specific locations, their effect can be severe. Research in the Nisqually estuary estimated that harbor seals consumed a substantial percentage of migrating steelhead smolts in certain years. Sea lions congregating below dams can intercept adult salmon concentrated at artificial bottlenecks.

Those losses matter, particularly when a salmon population is already depleted.

But “seals are eating all the salmon” is a partial truth too easily used as a complete explanation.

Seals do not explain poor salmon harvests in Russia. They do not explain historically weak Japanese chum returns, shrinking salmon body size across the North Pacific or the collapse of particular California stocks. Nor do they explain why survival relationships change following marine heatwaves.

The denominator matters. Predators taking 20,000 fish from a run of one million create a different biological result than taking the same number from a run of 50,000.

Predation may not have caused the original decline, but it can become decisive after habitat degradation, poor marine survival and reduced biological diversity have made a population fragile.

That leads to a more difficult question than how many salmon seals consume:

Why have we created salmon populations so depleted and concentrated that ordinary predation can determine whether they recover?

Seals are visible. A salmon in a seal’s mouth makes a compelling photograph. Changes in plankton composition, prey quality and juvenile marine survival are largely invisible.

Visible problems are easier to explain—and politically easier to address.

The ocean can contain food without providing nutrition

Marine food webs are not measured adequately by biomass alone.

A juvenile salmon does not simply need food. It needs the right prey, with sufficient nutritional value, at the correct depth and location, during a relatively narrow period of its development.

The same is true throughout the marine ecosystem.

Gray whales traditionally feed heavily on bottom-dwelling amphipods in Arctic and sub-Arctic waters. Changes in sea ice, primary production and the delivery of organic material to the seafloor can reduce the reliability of that food source.

Many of the gray whales found dead during the current mortality event have been thin or severely emaciated. The eastern North Pacific population has fallen from approximately 27,000 whales in 2016 to roughly 13,000.

Some individual whales are killed by ships, entanglement or predators. But food scarcity can be the underlying condition that pushes a malnourished whale into a busy harbor, keeps it there searching for food and leaves it less capable of surviving an injury.

Salmon face a related but distinct problem. Warmer conditions can shift plankton communities and forage-fish populations toward prey with lower energy content. At the same time, warmer water increases a salmon’s metabolic requirements.

The ocean may still contain life. It may simply produce less of the right food, in the right place, at the right time.

The organisms beneath the headlines matter most

Public attention naturally gravitates toward salmon, crab, whales, seals and seabirds. They are economically valuable, culturally significant, legally protected or emotionally compelling.

But these animals sit above a vast and comparatively obscure productive system:

• Phytoplankton that converts sunlight and nutrients into biological energy

• Copepods, krill and other zooplankton

• Herring, anchovy, smelt and sand lance

• Amphipods, clams, worms and other benthic organisms

• Eelgrass, kelp and estuarine detritus

• Microbial communities that recycle nutrients

• Ocean currents and seasonal upwelling that determine when and where productivity occurs

These are not supporting details. They are the foundation of the system.

Unfortunately, they are difficult and expensive to measure. There is no dockside landing ticket for copepods. Benthic sampling requires vessels, equipment and repeated scientific analysis. A plankton sample from one place on one date may say little about what juvenile salmon encountered six weeks earlier and 100 miles away.

Government funding also tends to follow economic value, legal mandates and public visibility. We therefore possess long time series for commercial landings and charismatic animals while maintaining thinner, fragmented records for many of the organisms that determine whether those animals survive.

The result is a reactive system. We often recognize a food-web disruption only after its consumers begin to fail.

Are these events connected?

We should be careful here.

A weak salmon return, a poor crab season and a gray-whale mortality event do not automatically share one immediate cause. Gray whales, juvenile salmon and Dungeness crab occupy different habitats, eat different foods and respond to environmental conditions on different timelines.

Natural variability is also fundamental to the Pacific. Crab recruitment can swing dramatically among year classes. Pink salmon follow powerful two-year cycles. Ocean currents periodically redistribute both predators and prey.

It would be irresponsible to take several alarming observations and declare that the entire Pacific ecosystem is collapsing.

It would be equally irresponsible to dismiss every event as isolated.

When unusual mortality, changing body condition, disrupted migration, harmful algal blooms, unstable recruitment and food-web changes appear across multiple species and large geographic areas, the cumulative pattern deserves investigation.

The most defensible conclusion is not that the Pacific is dying.

It is that the Pacific is becoming less predictable—and our current measurements may be poorly designed to tell us why.

We need an ecological balance sheet

Fisheries management will always need harvest data. But landings should be treated as one outcome within a larger ecological accounting system.

A serious Pacific monitoring framework would continuously examine:

• Phytoplankton abundance and species composition

• Zooplankton biomass, size and nutritional quality

• Forage-fish abundance and distribution

• Benthic biomass and biological diversity

• Water temperature throughout the water column

• Dissolved oxygen, salinity and pH

• Upwelling strength and seasonal timing

• Harmful algal blooms

• Eelgrass, kelp and estuarine habitat

• Animal growth, body condition and reproductive success

• Harvest, abundance and mortality at higher trophic levels

The key word is continuously.

Short research projects can answer specific questions, but they cannot reliably identify ecological regime changes without durable baselines. We need to know not only how much life is present, but whether the timing, nutritional quality and geographic relationships within the food web are changing.

That information will not eliminate uncertainty. It will allow us to ask better questions before the next fishery fails or the next group of starving whales washes ashore.

Count the engine, not just the casualties

Salmon harvests matter. Crab landings matter. Whale deaths matter. Seal predation matters.

But none of them can be understood fully in isolation.

If we focus only on the animals we catch, protect or find dead, we will continue managing symptoms at the surface while the machinery underneath remains poorly understood.

The future of the Pacific will not be determined solely by how many salmon fishermen land or how many whales reach shore. It will be determined by whether the ocean continues to produce sufficient food, of sufficient quality, in the places and seasons when marine life needs it.

Before we conclude that seals ate the salmon, ships killed the whales or fishermen caught too many crab, we should first determine whether the food web itself is changing.

We have become very good at counting the casualties. It is time to start measuring the ocean that produces them.