Humpback whale mother with stillborn calf shows ‘grief-like’ behaviour
· New Scientist
A humpback whale has been observed for the first time shortly after birthing a stillborn calf, showing apparent signs of grief similar to those seen in other large mammals such as elephants.
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The encounter began at around 8am on 17 July 2025, when Andrew Mulville at the Sea World Foundation, an Australian charity, was aboard a boat a kilometre offshore from the Gold Coast in Queensland.
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He noticed two adult whales milling in the same location, occasionally diving, vocalising and rolling on the surface. By 8.30am, Mulville saw and recorded an amniotic membrane floating on the surface, indicating a birth had occurred but, concerningly, no blood or placenta was visible.
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if( window?.adverts?.addToArray ) { window.adverts.addToArray( { "pos": "mid-article-slot" } ); }He then placed a camera underwater and saw a stillborn calf, less than 4 metres long, that had sunk to the sandy seabed. The mother repeatedly approached the calf, looked at it eye to eye, and touched it with her head and pectoral fin.
While such behaviour has been recorded in toothed whales with dead calves, it is extremely rare in baleen whales such as humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae).
Sign up to The Earth Edition Sign up to newsletterWith a live newborn, humpback mothers typically try to push the calf to the surface to help it breathe, but in this case she didn’t, perhaps suggesting she knew it wasn’t alive.
Meanwhile, the second adult stayed nearby, apparently supporting both the mother and dead calf.
Although stillbirth in mammals is common, it is extremely rare to observe the event in whales, says Olaf Meynecke at Griffith University in Australia, who co-wrote a paper with Mulville on the observation. To his knowledge, it has never before been witnessed in humpback whales.
“It’s really important to not humanise an encounter like this,” says Meynecke. “But then also to understand that it’s a mammal, and we have evidence of, not necessarily grief, but the really dramatic change of behaviour that we see in other mammals such as elephants when they lose a member of their group or when they lose their calves.”
Mulville observed the whales for the next 2 hours, staying in the immediate vicinity of the dead calf and continuously diving down to it. On the next two days, members of the public on shore reported seeing the two adult whales in the same location.
The incident has raised concerns about why the calf was stillborn, especially because seven deceased humpback whale neonates and one deceased young whale of unconfirmed age were also observed in July 2025 in the same region. None of these appeared to be the stillborn whale observed by the scientists.
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Also, while it has become increasingly common for humpbacks to calve in southern Queensland as their population has grown, no one is sure why so many female whales are now giving birth hundreds of kilometres south of their traditional breeding grounds in the Great Barrier Reef.
It was also extremely unusual that the mother didn’t deliver her placenta, and this may have also placed her at risk, says Meynecke.
Photos of her distinctive fluke have been uploaded to a database of 16,000 individuals, so the researchers hope she will be recognised if she re-appears in coming seasons.
Rebecca Dunlop at the University of Queensland says descriptive case study reports such as this one “run the risk of anthropomorphising observed behaviours”.
“However, the study does present a balanced argument of how the observed behaviour could be interpreted and notes that the terms ‘grief’, ‘emotion’ and ‘distress’ must be used with caution since we cannot definitively assign these terms to the observed behaviour,” says Dunlop.
She says only with “more data and more occurrences” would it be possible to test the hypothesis that what was observed was emotional or grieving behaviour.
Journal Reference:Discover Animals DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9