article_snippet.sent: Until now, scientists believed there were two distinct groups of gray whale - the Eastern gray whale, which travels along the west coast of US, and the much rarer Western gray whale, which journeys along the coast of eastern Asia.
article_snippet.sent: scientists used satellite-monitoring tags to track three Western North Pacific gray whales from three Western North Pacific gray whales primary feeding ground off Russia’s Sakhalin Island across the Pacific Ocean and down the West Coast of the US to Baja, Mexico.
article_snippet.sent: Gray whales found that Varvara, which is Russian for Barbara, visited the three major breeding areas for Eastern gray whales, which are found off North America, according to the study published by the Royal Society in the journal Biology Letters.
article_snippet.sent: A Western gray whale is shown .
article_snippet.sent: Varvarva is a 13-year-old Western gray whale.
article_snippet.sent: A Western gray whale was tagged off Russia's Sakhalin Island in September 2011.
article_snippet.sent: But instead, Varvarva turned up off Mexico's Baja Peninsula instead and mingled with Eastern gray whales near Eastern gray whales nursery lagoon in Mexico.
article_snippet.sent: Western gray whales were thought to have gone extinct by the 1970s before a small population was discovered in Russia off Sakhalin Island.
article_snippet.sent: Like experts western cousins, Eastern gray whales were decimated by whaling and listed as endangered, but conservation efforts led to experts recovery.
article_snippet.sent: But not all scientists believe that Western gray whales are a separate, distinct species, raising the possibility that only Eastern gray whales survive today.
article_snippet.sent: Scientists previously thought that gray whales 'hugged' the coastlines, either in Asia or North America.
article_snippet.sent: ‘The fact that endangered Western gray whales have such a long range and interact with Eastern gray whales was a surprise and leaves a lot of questions up in the air,’ said Bruce Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and lead author on the study.
article_snippet.sent: ’ Valentin Ilyashenko of the A.N Severtsov Institute for Ecology and Evolution, who is the Russian representative to the International Whaling Commission and co-author of the study, has proposed since 2009 that recent western and Eastern gray whale populations are not isolated.
article_snippet.sent: ’ Valentin Ilyashenko of the A.N Severtsov Institute for Ecology and Evolution, who is the Russian representative to the International Whaling Commission and co-author of the study said that the gray whales found in Russian waters are a part of an eastern population that is restoring the gray whales found in Russian waters former historical range.
article_snippet.sent: ‘The ability of the gray whales found in Russian waters to navigate across open water over tremendously long distances is impressive and suggests that some Western gray whales might actually be eastern grays,’
article_snippet.sent: But that doesn’t mean that there may not be some true Western gray whales remaining.
article_snippet.sent: If so, then the number of true Western gray whales is even smaller than we previously thought.