A Whale’s Long Vigil Raises the Question of Animal Grief

THE first sign something was wrong was that the resting whale would not stop diving. Marine biologists say a mother humpback whale’s refusal to abandon her dead calf points to a maternal bond that persists even once there is nothing left to protect. Two humpback whales had been idling for the better part of an hour off Australia’s Gold Coast, doing little more than arching their backs and slipping under for a minute or two at a time, and the boat crew nearby had almost written the sighting off as a nap. Then a GoPro lowered into the water found what the larger whale kept circling back to: a newborn calf, lying still on the seafloor, dead within minutes, perhaps hours, of being born.

Post mortem attentive behaviour, as scientists call it, has been recorded before in whales and dolphins, but almost always in toothed species with tight knit pods and calves that stay dependent for years. In more than a century of scattered reports on humpbacks and their baleen relatives, nobody had described a mother staying with a dead calf quite like this.

The observation happened at Palm Beach reef, a nearshore stretch of the Gold Coast, on 17 July 2025, when a private vessel crew spotted two adult humpbacks, each roughly 12 to 13 metres long, milling calmly on the surface. An amniotic membrane surfaced at around 8:30 that morning, and by 8:45 an underwater camera found a calf on the seafloor, estimated at under 4 metres and showing no sign of breathing or movement. The presumed mother approached repeatedly, touching the stillborn with her head and pectoral fin and holding her position eye to eye with it for a minute or more at a stretch. She did not try to push the calf toward the surface, the one gesture reported again and again in toothed whales that carry or lift their dead.

Why She Never Tried to Lift

That single choice, to hold a position rather than lift, is what makes this case unusual. It could mean the mother recognised her calf was gone and adjusted accordingly, or it could mean nothing about cognition at all: an instinct with nowhere left to go.

Griffith University‘s Jan-Olaf Meynecke, who led the study with Sea World Foundation’s Andrew Mulville, has spent years cataloguing how whales respond to injury, entanglement and death, and he says this case stands apart from the others he has reviewed. “Unlike reports of toothed whales where mothers have been observed lifting their dead calves to the surface, this humpback whale mother showed prolonged post-mortem behaviour and attention towards her deceased calf under the surface,” he said. The pair tracked the encounter for two hours before the boat left, and members of the public reported two adult humpbacks in the same patch of water on each of the following two days.

Mulville, who was piloting the rescue boat, said the scene took a minute to read. “When I actually worked out what was happening, I was totally surprised,” he said, adding that at first it looked like nothing more than two whales resting on the surface.

Meynecke’s case for calling this something like grief rests on comparison rather than direct measurement, since there is no way to run a hormone panel on a wild humpback mid-encounter. He points to a review that catalogued 106 death-related responses across aquatic mammals, 81 of them in cetaceans, and found the behaviour concentrated overwhelmingly in dolphins, which make up more than 90 percent of the reported odontocete cases, with cetaceans as a group tending to carry the corpse rather than abandon it. Killer whales have carried dead calves for days at a stretch, most famously the orca known as Tahlequah, who pushed her dead calf for 17 days across more than 1,500 kilometres in 2018. Humpbacks and other baleen whales rarely turn up in that literature at all, and Meynecke argues the gap is partly a quirk of anatomy: toothed whale calves tend to float when they die, while baleen calves, lacking the same blubber reserves, tend to sink almost immediately, taking the evidence down with them. “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days,” Meynecke said, describing behaviour that reads, on paper, remarkably like the caregiving humans recognise in themselves.

What One Sighting Can’t Settle

None of that settles what the mother actually experienced. The paper is careful to say that grief, in any sense that could be tested, remains difficult to demonstrate in an animal nobody can interview and few can watch for long.

This is a single documented event involving three animals, the mother, her stillborn calf and an escort, drawn from one boat’s two hour window, and the authors caution against reading too much certainty into it. The whale was never matched to Happy Whale’s catalogue of more than 15,800 identified individuals along Australia’s east coast, so nothing is known about her age, history or whether she has calved successfully before.

The timing adds an uncomfortable layer. In the same July, seven other humpback neonates and one unidentified young whale turned up dead between K’gari Island and Ballina, a stretch of coastline that also produced seven live newborn sightings within 30 kilometres of Palm Beach reef alone. Meynecke’s team does not claim to know why so many calves died that month, though he notes the birth occurred more than 500 kilometres south of the population’s main breeding grounds in the southern Great Barrier Reef, in cooler water than humpbacks typically choose. “This case study highlights the need for continued systematic documentation of rare neonatal mortality events to better understand the cognitive, emotional, and evolutionary significance of post-mortem behaviour in large whales,” he said.

Every additional sighting like this one chips away at how confidently anyone can say what a whale is or isn’t capable of feeling. “Understanding how non-human animals responded to death provides insight into their emotional lives, social bonds, and cognitive capacities,” Meynecke said, and the next mother who won’t leave her calf’s side may be the one that tips the answer.

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