Can Whales Mourn Their Young? Rare Sighting Off Australia Reignites the Question

For at least two hours, a mother humpback whale would not leave her stillborn calf’s body. She circled it, nudged it with her head, and lay motionless beside it, eye to eye, off the coast of Australia, in what scientists say is the first detailed record of this kind of behavior in the species. Never once did she try to push the calf toward the surface, the way grieving dolphins and orcas do with their dead young. She simply stayed, touching it again and again.

Researchers watching from a small boat near the Gold Coast on July 17, 2025, had expected to witness a birth. Around 8:30 a.m., the sac that surrounds a calf before delivery floated up from below. Fifteen minutes later, a camera lowered into the water revealed the calf lying still on the ocean floor, too small and unmoving to have survived.

Published in the journal Discover Animals by researchers Jan-Olaf Meynecke and Andrew Mulville, the case gives scientists a rare, up-close look at how one of the ocean’s most social animals responds to losing its young. It also landed in the middle of a troubling and still-unexplained wave of newborn humpback deaths along Australia’s east coast that same month.

A Humpback Whale Mother’s Final Hours With Her Calf

Two adult humpback whales, each roughly 40 feet long, were spotted resting quietly on the surface just over half a mile off Palm Beach reef on the Gold Coast, Queensland, on the morning of July 17, 2025. Researchers watching from a small private boat noticed nothing alarming at first. One whale, believed to be the mother, arched her back and took short dives lasting less than two minutes before resurfacing in nearly the same spot again and again, a pattern seen in earlier stages of other humpback births.

Around 8:30 a.m., a thin sac of tissue that had surrounded the calf before birth floated to the surface, a sign that birth had just happened. No blood was visible, likely because the water was murky. By 8:45 a.m., a GoPro camera lowered into the water showed a small calf lying motionless on the sea floor, estimated at under 13 feet long, on the smaller end for a humpback newborn. It showed no signs of breathing or movement.

What happened next set this case apart from anything researchers had documented before. Rather than swimming away, the mother stayed close. She approached the calf again and again, touching it with her head and fin, and at one point positioned herself alongside it, motionless, face to face, for stretches of at least a minute. A second adult whale, likely an escort, stayed nearby the whole time. Researchers recorded these interactions until they left the site at 10 a.m., roughly two hours after the birth.

Members of the public later reported seeing two adult humpbacks circling the same area from shore on July 18 and July 19, raising the possibility that the pair lingered near the site for days. That could not be confirmed, since the whales spotted from land were never identified up close.

How Scientists Pieced Together This Humpback Whale Story

Beyond what they saw directly, researchers pulled in outside evidence to fill in the picture. A nearby ocean buoy recorded the water temperature at 69 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of the event, and researchers gathered public reports of other whale sightings and strandings in the region. A photo of the mother’s tail, which scientists use like a fingerprint to identify individual whales through a database called Happy Whale, did not match any of the more than 15,800 humpbacks already cataloged along Australia’s east coast. That could mean she was a young adult, the researchers noted.

That timing turned out to be part of a much bigger, more troubling pattern. That same month, six other newborn humpback whales were found dead along the coastline between K’gari Island in Queensland and Ballina in New South Wales, bringing the total to seven dead neonates, including this calf, along with one more dead young whale whose age couldn’t be confirmed. Several live newborn sightings were also reported nearby. The spot where this calf died sits more than 300 miles south of the species’ main known breeding grounds in the southern Great Barrier Reef, adding to earlier signs that humpbacks are giving birth farther south than their traditional breeding grounds, including in cooler temperate waters.

Why this particular calf was stillborn, and why so many other calves died around the same time, remains unknown. Researchers noted that shortages of the tiny shrimp-like krill humpbacks eat in Antarctic waters have been linked to reproductive problems in the species before, but they stopped short of drawing a direct connection in this case.

Why This Whale Behavior Matters

Scientists have documented this kind of caregiving toward the sick, dying, or dead far more often in dolphins and orcas, animals known for long-term bonds between mothers and calves. The most famous example is a killer whale named Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf for 17 days across more than 900 miles in 2018, and did so again with another calf in 2025. Researchers who have reviewed dozens of similar cases found that whales and dolphins with years-long parenting relationships tend to show this kind of behavior far more than species whose calves become independent quickly.

Humpbacks and other large filter-feeding whales were thought to be different, and the reason may come down to basic biology. Newborn dolphins and orcas are born with enough blubber to float, so a dead calf often stays at the surface where a grieving mother can carry or push it. Newborn humpbacks lack that fat layer at birth and tend to sink quickly, which may explain why this kind of prolonged attendance has rarely, if ever, been caught on camera before.

Researchers think the absence of any rescue attempt might mean the mother recognized fairly quickly that her calf was not going to respond, rather than acting on instinct to revive it. Her behavior looked less like a struggle and more like closeness and attention: staying near, touching, watching.

Researchers also pointed to earlier findings that humpback whales have spindle neurons, a type of brain cell also found in elephants and primates that’s linked to social awareness and emotional processing. That doesn’t prove the whale was experiencing grief the way a human or an elephant might, and the paper notes that grief is hard to confirm in any wild animal without physical or biological measurements. But it adds to a growing pile of evidence that humpbacks may have the mental wiring to produce this kind of response.

What This Discovery Means for Humpback Whales

For decades, humpback whales were filed as the whales that don’t do this, the ones that leave their dead behind while dolphins and orcas linger. This one mother suggests that reputation may have been built on what no one could see rather than on what these whales actually feel. Newborn humpbacks sink instead of float, and their mothers’ final moments with them slip out of view almost as soon as they begin. If baleen whales grieve, or something close to it, the ocean has simply been very good at hiding it, and humpbacks may be far more like their toothed cousins than science assumed.