Underwater video recorded a humpback whale mother returning again and again to her dead newborn calf on the seafloor just a kilometre off Australia’s Gold Coast last July. For more than an hour, she stayed close, touching the calf with her head and pectoral fin and resting beside it eye-to-eye.
Olaf Meynecke said the encounter may be the first described case of a humpback whale mother caring for her deceased newborn calf. It is the kind of scene that forces a hard question: whether the animal was showing grief, or something harder to name.
The footage matters because scientists have rarely been able to watch death-related behavior like this in humpback whales. Dead newborn baleen whales often sink quickly, which makes them difficult to observe, and research on these whales is scarce compared with the better-documented cases in toothed whales. In 2018, Tahlequah carried her dead calf for 17 days over more than 1,500 kilometres, and similar dead-calf carrying has been seen in pilot whales and dolphins.
Humpback whale mothers spend almost a year in pregnancy and then the next few months feeding a calf with nutrient-rich milk. Right after delivery, they often lift the newborn to the surface for its first breath, and during the first months of life the calf depends entirely on its mother for nourishment, protection and migration guidance. Some calves do not survive because of disease, pollutants or a mother’s lack of fat reserves, but the underwater video does not explain why this calf died.
That uncertainty is also what keeps the scene from settling neatly into one explanation. Humpback whales do defend calves from killer whales, and researchers have also seen mothers remaining with injured or entangled whales, circling them, resting nearby and trying to assist. Meynecke said the behaviors could represent grief, but they could also reflect maternal attachment, confusion or instinctive caregiving, and he called it heartbreaking to watch.
For now, the Gold Coast footage stands as a rare glimpse of how a humpback whale mother responds when a calf is gone but not yet left behind. The mother’s meaning is not known, but the behavior itself is now on record, and that makes the next question less about whether it happened and more about how often it has gone unseen.
