We kind of stumbled upon this change in size, says Enrico Pirotta, a quantitative ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a co-author of the paper. I wasn't expecting the decline [in size] at all.
Pirotta and his colleagues based their findings on data gathered by drones that the team flew above gray whales between 2016 and 2022. The drones snapped photographs of 130 different animals, which scientists matched to databases that have tracked every whale in the group for decades.
This study relies on knowing these animals for much longer than just the years for which it studies them, Pirotta says.
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