Watch Unprecedented Footage of Sperm Whales Helping a Newborn Calf Take Its First Breaths

Unrelated animals worked with the mother and her relatives, marking the first known evidence of whales from multiple families assisting in a birth

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

March 31, 2026

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In July 2023, a team of researchers tracking whales off the Caribbean island of Dominica noticed something strange. A group of 11 sperm whales—which would normally be spaced out to forage—had gathered in a tight cluster near the water’s surface.

“That’s not the kind of behavior you normally see,” whale biologist Shane Gero, who was on the boat, tells Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American. The massive marine animals all seemed focused on one individual, a female named Rounder. Then, the researchers saw a gush of blood.

At first, they thought one of the animals had been attacked, perhaps by pilot whales the scientists had seen earlier in the day. But then Rounder pushed out a tiny tail, and the team realized they were witnessing something extraordinary: a birth.

“All the biologists on the boat were losing their minds,” Gero, of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit aiming to understand whale communication, says to Camille Bromley at National Geographic.

Rare video shows female sperm whales working together during a birth

Watch on

Gero and his colleagues captured the full birth on video with two drones. The footage shows the other sperm whales in the group—most of them female, many unrelated to the mother—teaming up to help deliver the calf and support it during its first few hours. The work, described in a study published March 26 in the journal Science, shows a type of cooperation that has never been documented in species beyond primates.

The findings “are incredibly exciting,” says Jeremy Goldbogen, a physiologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work, to Perri Thaler at Science. “They represent just the tip of the iceberg regarding our ability to study whales in entirely new ways using new technologies.”

The observation documents the whales before, during and after the birth. The cetaceans even spent about three hours taking turns lifting the newborn to the water’s surface so that it could take breaths until it could swim.

To understand the exact roles each whale played during the birth, the scientists used a machine-learning program to analyze the footage and identify patterns. Gero then had to use his knowledge of the whales to identify the individual creatures. “We needed a village of scientists to be able to make sense out of this event,” says study co-author David Gruber, a marine biologist and the president and founder of Project CETI, to National Geographic.

Whales from two families that don’t usually forage together helped support the calf in its first few hours, the team found. This suggests that the whales’ social bonds “are built on something more than just close familial ties,” says study co-author Alaa Maalouf, a machine-learning researcher at Project CETI, to Science. The most active helpers were the calf’s mother, its aunt and a juvenile female from the other family.

The study provides the best example of cross-family cooperation in sperm whales recorded thus far, Michael Weiss, research director of the nonprofit Center for Whale Research, who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Science. Still, he notes, this is just one instance, so more observations are needed to confirm that the behavior is typical for the species.

The researchers simultaneously published another paper in the journal Scientific Reports, where they describe the vocalizations captured during the birth. The team hopes to eventually match the audio with their footage, so that they can determine what specific sounds might mean.

“The ultimate goal is to understand the things that matter to beings who are fundamentally different from us,” Gero tells National Geographic.  

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.