If you've never seen whales up close, this year you have an unique opportunity to do so. The upside is that you're guaranteed really good looks at several. The downside is that they're dead. And that they smell truly awful.

All along the west coast of North America, dead Gray whales are washing up in unprecedented numbers. In 1999, 273 washed up on beaches from Mexico to Alaska; this year the total is expected to reach even higher. For comparison, the average number of Grays that had washed up dead in the same area for the three preceding years was 38. The actual number of Gray whales that may have died cannot be determined; the numbers represent only those that washed up.

Dave Rugh, of the National Marine Mammal Lab at NOAA, admits that data retrieval has been hampered by inconsistent reporting, particularly along the Mexican coastline and along the isolated, remote western side of Vancouver Island.

The northeast Pacific population of Gray whales is not considered to be in any danger; the last census, taken in 1997-1998, showed a population of 26,600, with an estimated 3% annual increase. But many are very interested in this unforeseen die-off.

At the end of June this year, I walked past five dead Grays in the 35 miles of Olympic National Park coastline between Rialto Beach and Shi Shi. The whales averaged 40 feet in length, and had been dead long enough that the raccoons and crows were ignoring the carcasses. The job of breaking down the bodies had been passed on to the flies and their kids, who were swarming industriously in the summer sun.

I've walked that rugged stretch of beach and boulders before, and have. usually found some large piece Of carrion being assiduously processed by the local fauna, but this year's excursion was memorably macabre: the five Grays, two sea lions, and three smaller carcasses (one of which was a sea otter). What's up with all that?

What's up are the residual effects of the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon: increased temperatures in the normally cold waters of the Bering Sea in the past couple of years curtailed the production of the crustacean-like amphipods that the gray whales stock up on. According to Mary Sue Brancato of NOAA, "El Nino was tough on the whole food chain, but it was tougher on the Grays because they're migratory."

Theirs is a curious cyclical existence: they spend a five month summer bingeing in the Bering, eating non-stop, scooping up huge mouthsful of silty sea floor, straining out the sand, mud, and water through their baleen, and swallowing the tiny little critters that inhabit the muck. Individual whales put away up to 67 tons of these benthic amphipods during this five month period.

End of summer, they swim 5000 miles south to the seaward side of Baja, where they pretty much don't eat, but either give birth or have wild whale sex all winter cavorting in some sunny, sheltered lagoon.

And cavort they do. Because many females are either nursing calves or giving birth, there are far more males tooling around looking for action than there are available females. Gray whales have apparently found a way to expedite mating, which we'll call "The support group."

In this activity, two or more males will swim up beneath a female and support her weight so that a third male can mate with her. Only a couple possible scenarios could justify this seeming altruism and good old boy camaraderie:

1. It makes for better sex., and they take turns so everybody gets to have better sex and/or

2. It hurries the process so they can all more quickly have a turn.

Who goes first? Whale biology suggests that it is in the male whale's genetic self-interest to appear generous by swimming "support" and allowing the other males to have their turns first. This is because the "delivery system" and the sheer volume of the whale's genetic contribution tends to hose away any prior contributions. Of course, we don't know that they know this.

Gary Larson could have a field day with this: Imagine a bunch of stud bull whales standing around (?) leaning on their stubby little fins, deferring oh-so-politely to their brethren, "Oh, no, I just couldn't. You go first." "No, after you. I insist." "No, really, I'm a bit tired out. You go."

He who laughs last...

And speaking of genetic delivery systems... as I circled my first whale carcass and passed the tail, coming up along the underside, I noticed something I'd never seen on PBS, 'Hey, this whale's got legs! No, a leg, anyway. OH...'

Though quite dead, the Gray was sporting almost a yard of distended male member. As I found out later, it's usually kept tucked away inside a body cavity (so it doesn't get scraped off on a rock or something, I suppose). This whale was far beyond being happy to see anybody, so my guess was that as the decomposing body began to produce gases, anything that could inflate, did. When I explained this now wild-sounding theory to Mary Sue Brancato, she said, "Hmmm. Sounds reasonable."

As I continued on up the beach past other whale corpses (four of the five I saw were male, and were similarly distended) I began to conjecture in typical male fashion, doing the math in my head to determine who might be better equipped, the whale or I. Had to consider, of course, that as the whale was quite dead he might not have been too awfully excited, and so forth...

Come spring, they head back north 5000 miles, returning to gorge themselves at their summer feeding grounds.

It's a living.

The drastic water temperature shift in 1998 that cut seabed productivity in the Bering Sea also brought Pacific green turtles to the Washington coast, far north of their usual range. Most eventually got lethargic, stranded and died. This was also the summer that saw several sightings of great white sharks and other warmer-water fish off the Oregon and Washington coasts, and the summer that amateur videotape shot off the southern Washington coast showed a great white and an Orca bloodily battling it out.

An altogether curious, aberrant year.

The Gray whales didn't starve right away. They managed to feed, but just not as much as usual. And that primal urge to head south to make more whales was strong enough that they made the trip down to Baja in the fall of 1998.

It was after that, on the spring 1999 trip back up the coast that they began to drop out, undernourished and exhausted. Those that managed to survive the journey found their feeding grounds still less productive than usual, giving them enough energy to return to Baja, but not much more. Which brings us up to this summer, as dead Grays stink up beaches all along the west coast. What price sex?

That's the current theory, anyway, based on the known decrease in productivity in the Bering Sea, and the fact that many of the Gray whale carcasses examined show signs of simply having died of starvation.

Tissue samples from many of the dead whales have been taken, and are being analyzed, looking for any accumulations of toxins, like those that have been found in resident Orca populations in Puget Sound, and linked to increased mortality there, but none have yet been found.

So, current theory is that this population of Gray whales may simply have exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment (given a bad couple of years).

Humpbacks and other baleen whales also migrate to feed in the Bering, though on different prey, but it is as yet unknown if their populations have been affected. It may never be known, as, unlike the Grays, which are coastal inhabitants, humpbacks are open-ocean denizens (their bodies might never reach shore).

Just after picking up the photos from the trip, I ran into ex-girlfriend and her husband. Told them a bit about the trip, and they asked to see the pictures. Theresa's husband, the few times I'd met him, had always seemed a quiet, sober, serious sort of fellow. I felt a bit awkward when he shuffled through the photos to the whale dick shot. He regarded it solemnly, furrowed his brow, and asked, "How long was this? And how long was the whale?"

Theresa, thoroughly disgusted, opined that "it's a 'guy thing.'"