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. Gray whales make one of the longest annual migrations of any mammal, traveling about 10,000 miles round-trip and in some cases upwards of 14,000 miles. On their migration routes they face threats from vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and other sources of disturbance (NOAA website).This tissue sample was collected by dart biopsy at sea under NMFS permit 14097. The sample was cultured and frozen by Susanne Meyer at UCSB, and coordinated by Phil Morin to later generate a high-quality reference for the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). Genome sequencing and assembly were conducted at the Vertebrate Genomes Lab (VGL) at the Rockefeller University, led by Olivier Fedrigo and Erich D. Jarvis. In-situ Hi-C data (Rao, Huntley et al., Cell 2014) were provided by DNAzoo (from a different animal; DNAzoo.org assembly ID 'Eschrichtius_robustus_HiC' SRR12437598 in NCBI).