Eschrichtius robustus
Once common throughout the Northern Hemisphere, gray whales are now only regularly found in the North Pacific Ocean where there are two extant populations, one in the eastern and one in the western North Pacific. Gray whales earned the nickname 'devil fish' because of their aggressive reactions when harpooned. Commercial whaling rapidly brought both Pacific populations to near extinction. International conservation measures were enacted in the 1930s and 1940s to protect whales from over-exploitation, and in the mid-1980s the International Whaling Commission instituted a moratorium on commercial whaling. Gray whales are known for their curiosity toward boats in some locations and are the focus of whale watching and ecotourism along the west coast of North America. (NOAA website). This cell sample was collected in Santa Barbara, California by staff at SeaWorld San Diego. The sample was converted to a cell line, provided by Marlys Houck of Frozen Zoo, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and coordinated by Phil Morin to generate transcriptome data for the mEscRob2 reference assembly for the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Transcriptome and genome sequencing and assembly were conducted at the Vertebrate Genomes Lab (VGL) at the Rockefeller University, led by Jennifer Balacco, Giulio Formenti, and Erich D. Jarvis.