Off the southern end of Australia’s Gold Coast, a Sea World Foundation rescue boat crew came across a humpback whale mother who would not leave her dead calf’s side. For hours, and quite possibly for days, she stayed pressed against the stillborn calf, holding eye contact with it and repositioning her body each time it drifted, according to the marine biologist who later reviewed the footage. Researchers now call the encounter one of the first detailed, published records of this kind of behavior in a baleen whale.
Sea World Foundation rescue boat captain Andrew Mulville had no idea what he was looking at when he first spotted the pair. He initially took the two whales for a mother and calf resting together at the surface, the kind of sight his crew logs routinely along that stretch of coastline. It took several more minutes of watching, and a slow approach so as not to disturb them, before he realized the calf was not moving on its own and the mother had no intention of leaving it.
Days pressed against a stillborn calf
The researcher who reviewed the sighting, Olaf Meynecke of Griffith University’s Whales and Climate Research Program, said the mother’s behavior went well beyond a brief nudge or a single pass. “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days,” Meynecke said, describing a level of sustained attention rarely captured on camera in any baleen species.
Griffith and Sea World Foundation staff who reviewed the encounter called it one of the first documented cases of post-mortem attendance behavior in a baleen whale, according to the researchers’ account of the sighting. Toothed whales such as orcas have drawn attention before for carrying dead calves for days at a time, but comparable footage of a humpback — a filter-feeding baleen species with a very different social structure — is far rarer.
A second whale, and a rare piece of footage
The mother was not alone at the surface. A second adult whale stayed nearby throughout the encounter, which took place on July 17, 2025, off Queensland, according to Smithsonian magazine’s account of the sighting. Mulville later told Australia’s national broadcaster that the scene felt strangely moving even from the boat, with the sounds of both whales carrying through the hull as his crew held back to avoid disturbing them.
The find fits into a larger effort. Griffith’s Whales and Climate Research Program tracks humpback populations recovering from commercial whaling across the Southern Hemisphere, with partner researchers at universities in South Africa, Brazil and Ecuador comparing how the animals are responding to changing ocean conditions along their migration routes. A single dead calf, attended by its mother for hours, is a small data point inside that larger monitoring effort — but one a rescue crew happened to catch on video.
Reading grief into whale behavior
Meynecke has spent years comparing whale behavior with species where mourning is better studied. “It’s really sad. It’s pretty heartbreaking to watch this female making continuous contact with the deceased calf,” he said, according to CBS News‘s report on the case. He added that comparable attachment has been recorded “from elephants and apes and cases that are also extremely heartbreaking.”
Not every scientist is willing to call it grief outright. Vanessa Pirotta, a whale researcher at Macquarie University who was not involved in documenting the sighting, cautioned that scientists have to be careful about projecting human emotion onto animal behavior, however sorrowful a scene looks from a boat deck. Her point was narrower than a denial: careful, repeated observation, not assumption, is what eventually turns an anecdote like this one into something researchers can compare across sightings and species.
Meynecke has also acknowledged the limits of what a rescue boat can tell researchers. Without instruments on the whale itself, there is no way to measure stress hormones or confirm what the mother was experiencing internally during those hours; the record consists of video, GPS positions and a trained eye watching from a distance. That gap between what a camera can capture and what an animal actually feels is exactly why a single well-documented sighting like this one draws so much scientific interest, rather than being dismissed as an emotional retelling of an ordinary event.
Humpback calves nurse for close to a year before weaning, and mothers typically stay within close range of a newborn during that stretch of the migration between Antarctic feeding grounds and warmer breeding waters off eastern Australia. A stillbirth cuts that bond off almost immediately, which is part of why Meynecke and his colleagues found the mother’s continued presence so striking: whatever drove her to stay, it persisted well past the point where the calf could offer anything back.
The researchers who logged the sighting wrote that, to their knowledge, “this is the first detailed, documented occurrence of this behaviour for this species,” leaving open how often mother humpbacks linger with calves that do not survive birth, and how much of it observers at sea have simply never been positioned to see.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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