A Humpback Whale Mom Stayed With Her Stillborn Calf, Repeatedly Touching It and Staring Into Its Eyes. Was She Grieving?
Observed last year off the coast of Queensland, Australia, this event marks the first documentation of a stillbirth in the species, providing a rare glimpse at how the highly social animals respond to death
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After giving birth to a stillborn calf, a humpback whale mother repeatedly approached and touched her dead offspring. While the behavior may resemble grief, scientists caution against assuming that animals experience or express emotions the same way humans do.
Researchers describe the tragic scene, which unfolded last year off the coast of Queensland, Australia, in a study published September 16 in the journal Discover Animals.
Study co-author Andrew Mulville was fishing with his son on the morning of July 17, 2025, when he heard from the team at Sea World Foundation, the Australian environmental nonprofit where he works as a rescue boat captain. Concerned members of the public had reported two humpbacks lingering in shallow water roughly half a mile from the Gold Coast near the Palm Beach Reef, so Mulville headed over to check on them.
After watching the whales for 30 minutes or so, Mulville noticed that one of the whales got into a vertical position with its tail pointing skyward. Then, he spotted an amniotic membrane—part of a placenta—floating on the surface, suggesting that the massive marine mammal had given birth. But Mulville didn’t see a calf, so he grabbed his GoPro and started recording.
The underwater footage revealed that the whale had given birth to a stillborn calf, which had subsequently sunk to the seafloor. The mother repeatedly swam down to the calf’s body, trying to look it in the eye, touching it with her head and pectoral fin, and resting near it on the seafloor.
When humpbacks birth live calves, they usually try to push their offspring to the water’s surface to encourage breathing. That didn’t happen in this case, making the researchers wonder whether the mother knew her calf was dead.
The other adult whale remained nearby, likely acting as an escort as the pregnant female prepared to give birth. Humpback whales of both sexes commonly accompany pregnant females and may also travel alongside mothers and their newborn calves during migration.
Did you know? Elephant responses to death
Asian elephants have been observed standing guard over the bodies of their dead peers, changing their postures, making noises and investigating and touching the carcasses. They’ve also been known to bury their dead.
Even for Mulville, who has spent the last 25 years rescuing and caring for whales, it was a “pretty powerful moment.”
“But I suppose at the same time it was nature, and pretty emotional underwater with the sounds of both the mother and also a second adult companion animal there,” he tells Emma Johnson of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Mulville kept watching the whales for roughly another hour and a half, during which the mother continued to attend to the calf’s body. Afterward, experts conducting animal surveys and members of the public reported seeing two adult humpback whales in the same area over the next two days.
Was the humpback mother actually grieving? Maybe, but the scientists write in the study that it’s difficult to prove “due to the lack of physiological or neurological measurements in wild animals.” And even if she was grieving, whales—and other animals—may experience emotions differently from humans.
We should not “anthropomorphize” the whale’s actions, says Vanessa Pirotta, a whale researcher at Macquarie University in Australia who was not involved with the study, to the ABC. “What we can do is we can learn from observations, and that’s exactly what science is about.”
Study co-author Olaf Meynecke, a marine ecologist at Griffith University in Australia, suspects humpbacks may experience an “emotional state that is not necessarily comparable to ours … but there is something there that is quite strong,” he tells the Sydney Morning Herald’s Angus Dalton.
“It’d be so much easier if you could just ask them,” he adds.
Still, whether it’s evidence of grief or not, the footage offers a “rare window” into how the highly social whales respond to death, which is one of the least understood aspects of their complex behavior, Meynecke writes in the Conversation. The animal’s actions seem to align with other known humpback tendencies, such as protecting other species from predators and assisting their distressed peers—all signs of the species’ strong social bonds.
Setting aside the possible grief-like behaviors, the observations are noteworthy for another reason. Scientists have described only about 20 humpback births in total, Meynecke tells Live Science’s Sascha Pare. And as far as he and Mulville can tell, this is the first documentation of a stillbirth in the species.
“It is extremely rare to witness,” Meynecke notes.
One reason scientists may not have observed a humpback stillbirth until now is that newborn calves are not buoyant enough to remain at the surface on their own. Without an adult to keep them afloat, their bodies can sink quickly, making stillbirths difficult for researchers to document.
“Of course, something like this probably has occurred before, but we just don’t know about it,” Meynecke tells the Australian Associated Press’ Duncan Murray. “When it does happen, it’s really hidden beneath the surface of the ocean.”
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