page_title: Gray whale
section_title: Life history
hierarchical_section_title: Gray whale / Life history
caption_attribution_description: English: A whale, with Laguna Peak of the Santa Monica Mountains in background — Ventura County, California.
context_page_description: The gray whale, also known as the grey whale, gray back whale, Pacific gray whale, or California gray whale, is a baleen whale that migrates between feeding and breeding grounds yearly. It reaches a length of 14.9 meters, a weight of up to 41 tonnes and lives between 55 and 70 years, although one female was estimated to be 75-80 years of age. The common name of the whale comes from the gray patches and white mottling on its dark skin. Gray whales were once called devil fish because of their fighting behavior when hunted. The gray whale is the sole living species in the genus Eschrichtius, which in turn is the sole living genus in the family Eschrichtiidae. This mammal is descended from filter-feeding whales that appeared at the beginning of the Oligocene, over 30 million years ago.
  The gray whale is distributed in an eastern North Pacific, and an endangered western North Pacific, population. North Atlantic populations were extirpated on the European coast before AD 500, and on the American coast around the late 17th to early 18th centuries.
caption: A whale swims nearby Santa Monica Mountains.
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