On July 17, 2025, off the southern Gold Coast of Australia, a humpback whale gave birth to a stillborn calf within sight of Andrew Mulville, a rescue boat captain at the Sea World Foundation. Video footage he captured over the next few hours confirmed what had happened: The calf had died and sunk to the seabed.
What happened next was something that had never been seen before. The mother whale stayed close to the calf for several hours, attempting to maintain eye contact and seemingly looking for a sign of response.
We don’t know for sure if this was grief—it may have been confusion or an instinctive caregiving response—but as the mother didn’t lift her calf to the surface, which is a common action in humpback whale births, it seems she knew something was wrong.
Mulville has now co-authored a new study, published in Discover Animals, with marine ecologist Jan-Olaf Meynecke from Griffith University in Australia. As sad as the footage is, it helps experts better understand this particular type of cetacean.
Read more: “Inside the Largest Whale Graveyard on Earth”
“These observed behaviors were consistent with care-giving or nurturing actions and post-mortem attentive responses documented in socially complex mammals, and indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calf,” Meynecke explained in a statement. “Unlike reports of toothed whales where mothers have been observed lifting their dead calves to the surface, this humpback whale mother showed prolonged post-mortem behavior and attention towards her deceased calf under the surface.”
Despite being the first firm evidence of such behavior in humpbacks, as Meynecke mentioned, it’s much more typical in toothed wales. Case in point: the famous case of the orca Tahlequah in 2018, where the whale carried her dead calf above water for 17 days while crossing more than a thousand miles of ocean. Back then, there were also questions about what constitutes grief, and whether we can ever recognize it in animals without being able to read their minds.
The identity of the humpback whale mother in the video is a mystery, as she didn’t match up with a database of more than 15,800 whales spotted off the east coast of Australia. It’s possible she’ll never be seen again, but she’s now part of the scientific record.
And while the video isn’t an easy watch, the mother whale’s expression speaks to something that criss-crosses species, continents, and the border between land and sea: the “cost of commitment,” as psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes put it in the paper.
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Lead Image: Meynecke & Mulville, Discover Animals, 2026
