A humpback mother stayed with her stillborn calf for hours off the Gold Coast

Down on the seafloor off Queensland’s Gold Coast lay a stillborn humpback calf, and above it a mother whale kept diving back to touch it, hold eye contact and settle beside it. Marine ecologist Olaf Meynecke of Griffith University, who led the paper describing the scene, says she stayed close over several hours and possibly days.

The event was filmed on July 17, 2025, from a Sea World Foundation rescue boat near Palm Beach Reef, and the paper describing it was published on September 16, 2026. Griffith University and the Sea World Foundation are the two institutions behind the work, and the author team includes the boat’s captain as well as the university ecologist.

Palm Beach Reef on July 17, 2025

The paper, published in the journal Discover Animals, is titled “First documentation of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) post-mortem attendance of a stillborn.” The setting was Palm Beach Reef, several hundred meters offshore in shallow water on the southern Gold Coast, according to the Australian Museum’s AAP report.

Andrew Mulville, a rescue boat captain with the Sea World Foundation and a co-author, noticed two humpbacks at the surface and started filming. He told AAP the whales’ behavior was unusual and “definitely not” what he expected to see. Live Science credits Mulville with shooting the video on a GoPro, and says it was recorded in July 2025.

Dives, fin touches and a second adult

The mother repeatedly dove to the calf, which lay motionless on the bottom. Live Science describes her descending to eye level with it, resting beside the body for about a minute at a time, and sliding a pectoral fin over it before returning to the surface. She did not try to lift or carry the calf to the surface, which separates her from the toothed whales covered in earlier reports. The calf stayed on the bottom throughout, and the mother’s return trips from the surface to the seafloor are what make up most of the footage.

According to Smithsonian magazine, the crew watched for about 30 minutes at first and then for roughly 1.5 hours more, which puts the continuous observation at around two hours. A second adult humpback stayed near the pair, likely an escort, a role that humpbacks commonly take on around births and migrations. Other whales were reported in the area over the next two days.

Two hours seen, “maybe even days” inferred

The duration claim needs two separate readings. What the crew saw directly adds up to about two hours. The longer figure comes from Meynecke, who said, “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” The days part is his inference, not something the cameras recorded, and the two hours of continuous watching is the firm number. Other whales were seen in the area over the following two days, according to Smithsonian, but no one has documented that this particular mother remained with the calf for that long, and Meynecke’s own wording keeps “maybe” in front of it. For a species where a birth is rarely witnessed at all, a two-hour record is still unusual enough to publish.

Meynecke leads Griffith’s Whales and Climate Research Program, and the Australian Museum report quotes him on why such records matter: “Understanding how non-human animals responded to death provides insight into their emotional lives, social bonds, and cognitive capacities.” The Australian Museum report adds that Meynecke’s work points to strong maternal attachment and possible grief, behavior consistent with what is described in elephants and primates. He has also cautioned that a humpback’s state of mind is not necessarily comparable to a person’s, adding that “there is something there that is quite strong.”

Toothed whales, Tahlequah and a baleen first

Most documented cases of cetaceans staying with dead young involve toothed whales and dolphins. The best known is the orca Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf for 17 days in 2018, as the Australian Museum report recalls. Pushing a body toward the surface is the behavior usually described in those animals, and Discover Wildlife notes that the humpback case is a rarely reported one among baleen whales.

Scale makes the record scarce. Live Science quotes Meynecke saying, “It is extremely rare to witness. Only about 20 births of humpback whales have been observed,” so a stillbirth on camera sits inside a very small set of recorded events, and the mother’s behavior around it is documented here for the first time in the species. The paper counts as the first documentation of this kind for the species, and Meynecke’s remark about the roughly 20 observed births is the figure that frames how few chances scientists have had to see one.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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