The Pacific gray whales’ near-miraculous return from the edge of extinction (twice) may be more precarious than we thought. From the AP a couple of days ago, notice of a new DNA study out of Stanford estimating we’ve underestimated the whales’ historic population by a factor of five. In other words, there weren’t 20,000 or 30,000 whales pre-whaling, but 100,000. Worse, our current (supposedly recovered) population is starving. The National Marine Fisheries Service reports this year that at least 10 percent of gray whales are underweight and hungry. It seems our increasingly impoverished ocean can no longer support the whales it once did. Why not? Well, let’s start with that ugly symbiosis between food shortages and climate change. Then factor in the more than one billion of us—that’s right, one in six people on Earth—who are overweight, 300 million of whom are clinically obese, according to the World Health Organization. Add the fact that humanity gobbles more than a quarter of the planet’s natural resources. Presto! The lardass equation: more of us equals less of them. JULIA WHITTY
