{"id":115920,"date":"2026-09-18T07:04:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115920"},"modified":"2026-09-18T07:04:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T11:04:51","slug":"do-animals-grieve-humpback-whale-stillborn-calf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/do-animals-grieve-humpback-whale-stillborn-calf\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Animals Grieve? A Humpback Mother Stayed With Her Calf"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 42 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>In July 2025, a rescue boat captain off the Gold Coast in Australia was called out to check on a humpback whale that was acting strangely. She wasn&#8217;t swimming north with the others. She wasn&#8217;t feeding or playing. She was just staying in one spot.<\/p>\n\n<p>When he put an underwater camera down, he found out why. On the sea floor below her lay a newborn calf. It had been born dead.<\/p>\n\n<p>The mother stayed with it. She lay beside it. She touched it with her head and her fin. And she kept looking at it. Another adult whale stayed nearby the whole time.<\/p>\n\n<p>The footage was published this week in a science journal, and it has people everywhere asking an old question: <strong>do animals grieve?<\/strong> The honest answer is more interesting than a simple yes. And it has something to say to anyone who has ever lost someone they barely got to hold.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What the Humpback Whale Footage Actually Shows<\/h2>\n\n<p>The video was filmed by Andrew Mulville, a rescue boat captain with the Sea World Foundation, off Palm Beach on the southern Gold Coast. The report was written up by researchers including Dr Olaf Meynecke of Griffith University&#8217;s Whales and Climate Research Program, and published in the journal <em>Discover Animals<\/em> in September 2026. You can read <a href=\"https:\/\/news.griffith.edu.au\/2026\/09\/17\/weeping-whales-stillborn-humpback-whale-grieving-documented\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Griffith University&#8217;s summary of the study here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is what was seen:<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>The mother and a second &#8220;escort&#8221; whale stayed with the dead calf for <strong>at least two hours<\/strong> while they were being watched.<\/li>\n<li>She went back to the calf again and again, touching it with her head and fin.<\/li>\n<li>She lay still next to it and kept her eye on it.<\/li>\n<li>The two whales were not travelling and not socialising. They were milling in the same patch of water.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>Dr Meynecke said she stayed close, &#8220;maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.&#8221; Notice the careful words: <em>maybe<\/em> even days. The team saw hours. The days are a possibility, not a measurement.<\/p>\n\n<p>The researchers say that, as far as they know, this is the first detailed record of this behaviour in humpback whales. It is common enough in dolphins and toothed whales. But in the great filter-feeding whales, the baleen whales, it had barely been written down at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>And there is one detail that most of the coverage rushed past. Toothed whale mothers who lose a calf have been seen lifting its body to the surface and carrying it. The most famous case is an orca known as Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf for 17 days in 2018. This humpback mother did not do that. She stayed <em>down there<\/em>, under the surface, beside her calf where it lay.<\/p>\n\n<p>She didn&#8217;t try to fix it. She just stayed.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Do Animals Grieve? What Scientists Can and Can&#8217;t Say<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is where it&#8217;s worth slowing down, because the headlines ran ahead of the science a little.<\/p>\n\n<p>The researchers themselves did not say &#8220;this whale was grieving.&#8221; They used a more careful phrase: <strong>post-mortem attentive behaviour<\/strong>. That means paying close attention to a body after death. Dr Meynecke said the behaviour &#8220;strongly suggests at least a strong attachment&#8221; to the calf. Another whale scientist who was not part of the study, Dr Vanessa Pirotta of Macquarie University, told the ABC that this kind of behaviour is challenging to interpret, and warned against reading human feelings into it.<\/p>\n\n<p>That&#8217;s a fair warning. We can see what the whale did. We cannot see inside her.<\/p>\n\n<p>But scientists who study animal grief have a useful way to think about it. The anthropologist Barbara J. King, who wrote a book called <em>How Animals Grieve<\/em>, suggested a simple test. Grief may be present when two animals have a real bond, and then, after one dies, the one left behind changes what it normally does. It might stop eating. It might stop moving on. It stays.<\/p>\n\n<p>By that test, the humpback mother fits. Humpbacks off that coast in July are on the move. She wasn&#8217;t. She stopped her whole life in one spot of water to stay beside a calf that would never swim.<\/p>\n\n<p>And she is not alone. Elephants have been seen returning to the bones of their dead. Some ape mothers carry a dead infant for days. Tahlequah the orca did it twice. In 2018, she carried her calf for 17 days. Years later, researchers reported her carrying another dead newborn.<\/p>\n\n<p>So do animals grieve? The most honest answer is this: <strong>many animals clearly form bonds, and when those bonds are broken, many of them act in ways that look a lot like grief.<\/strong> Whether it feels to them the way it feels to us, nobody can say for sure. What we can say is that it tends to show up where there was a bond first.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Other Whale That Stayed<\/h2>\n\n<p>A lot of people who watched the video were moved by the second whale, the one that stayed close while the mother was with her calf. It looks like a friend keeping someone company at a hospital bed.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is the part the story doesn&#8217;t usually tell. In humpback research, &#8220;escort&#8221; is simply the name for an adult whale that travels alongside a mother and her calf. In breeding season, escorts are often males, and scientists usually see their company as courtship, not comfort. The published reports don&#8217;t say who this escort was, or why it stayed.<\/p>\n\n<p>So we should be honest: we don&#8217;t know what that whale was doing there.<\/p>\n\n<p>But we do know what it looked like to the people watching. And it&#8217;s telling that when we saw a mother beside her dead calf, the thing that moved us most was that <em>someone else didn&#8217;t leave<\/em>. That reaction says less about whales, and more about what we know, deep down, that we need.<\/p>\n\n<h2>She Never Got to Know Her Calf. She Stayed Anyway.<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is the detail that stopped me.<\/p>\n\n<p>The calf was stillborn. The mother never nursed it. She never swam with it, never taught it to breathe at the surface, never led it south to the feeding grounds. By any outside measure, they had no shared life at all.<\/p>\n\n<p>And still she stayed.<\/p>\n\n<p>Whatever bond she had was formed before the calf ever took a breath. It didn&#8217;t need a history. It was already there.<\/p>\n\n<p>If you have lost a baby, before birth or at birth, you may have heard some version of &#8220;at least you didn&#8217;t get to know them.&#8221; It is usually meant kindly. It is almost never helpful. Because you <em>did<\/em> know them. You knew them the way that mother whale knew her calf: completely, before there was anything to show for it.<\/p>\n\n<p>Your grief is not too big for the time you had. It is exactly the size of the love.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Grief Is What Love Does When It Loses Something<\/h2>\n\n<p>People sometimes treat grief like a problem, something to get over, or a sign that we are not coping. Or, for people of faith, a sign that we don&#8217;t trust enough.<\/p>\n\n<p>But grief doesn&#8217;t show up where there is no love. Even that scientific test for animal grief starts there: first the bond, then the loss, then the change. Grief is not love breaking down. It is love, still doing its job, with nowhere left to go.<\/p>\n\n<p>There&#8217;s an old story, told for two thousand years, of Jesus standing outside the grave of a friend and crying, even though, in that story, he knew what was about to happen next. The tears were not a lack of faith. They were what love looks like at a graveside. It may be the most human thing ever said about God: that when we stand beside what we&#8217;ve lost, God does not stand at a distance telling us to cheer up. God stays, and weeps with us.<\/p>\n\n<h2>If Someone You Love Has Lost a Baby<\/h2>\n\n<p>You don&#8217;t need training or money to help. You mostly need to do what that second whale appeared to do.<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Stay.<\/strong> Sit with them. You don&#8217;t need to fill the silence.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Say the baby&#8217;s name<\/strong>, if the baby had one. Many parents are afraid everyone else will forget.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Skip the reasons.<\/strong> Avoid &#8220;it was meant to be&#8221; or <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-answers\/is-everything-happens-for-a-reason-in-the-bible\/\">&#8220;everything happens for a reason&#8221;<\/a>. They close a door the person needs open.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Come back later.<\/strong> Weeks later, when the cards stop, is often when it hurts most. The same is true of any loss, which is why the best advice for <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/relationships-and-family\/what-to-say-to-someone-who-lost-a-parent\/\">what to say to someone who lost a parent<\/a> is to stay past the funeral.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Remember the dates.<\/strong> A due date, a birth date. A short message on those days can mean more than anything said at the time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>What the Ocean Keeps Showing Us<\/h2>\n\n<p>The sea is still full of things we have never seen. Not long ago, scientists filmed <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/antarctic-krill-hydrothermal-vents\/\">Antarctic krill living at hydrothermal vents 1,100 metres down<\/a>, where no one expected them. Now a humpback mother, filmed by a rescue captain on a winter&#8217;s day, has shown researchers something they had never properly recorded before.<\/p>\n\n<p>We don&#8217;t know exactly what she felt. But we know what she did. She stopped. She stayed close. She kept looking.<\/p>\n\n<p>If you are carrying a loss right now, maybe that is all you need to do today, too. You don&#8217;t have to be over it. You just have to be where you are, with someone who isn&#8217;t going anywhere.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Discussion Question<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>When you watched or read about this humpback mother, did it look like grief to you, or do you think we&#8217;re reading too much of ourselves into it? Tell us what you think in the comments.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<blockquote><p>A humpback whale mother stayed beside her stillborn calf on the sea floor for hours. She never got to know her baby. She stayed anyway. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115920<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;At least you didn&#8217;t get to know them&#8221; is not comforting. This whale story explains why better than I ever could. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115920<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<blockquote><p>Grief only shows up where there was love first. Even scientists studying animals say so. Worth reading if you&#8217;ve lost someone: https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=115920<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<h2>Questions and Answers<\/h2>\n\n<h3>Do animals grieve?<\/h3>\n<p>Many animals form strong bonds, and when one of them dies, the survivor often changes its normal behaviour in ways that look like grief. Elephants return to the bones of their dead, some ape mothers carry dead infants for days, and an orca called Tahlequah carried her dead calf for 17 days in 2018. Scientists cannot know for certain whether animals feel grief the way humans do, so many researchers use careful terms such as &#8220;post-mortem attentive behaviour&#8221; instead.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Do whales grieve their dead calves?<\/h3>\n<p>Whales have been seen staying with dead calves, which many researchers read as a sign of strong attachment and possibly grief. It has mostly been recorded in toothed whales such as orcas and dolphins, whose mothers have been seen lifting a dead calf to the surface and carrying it. In 2025, a humpback mother off the Gold Coast, Australia, was filmed staying beside her stillborn calf on the sea floor for at least two hours, which researchers believe is the first detailed record of this behaviour in humpbacks.<\/p>\n\n<h3>What did the humpback whale do with her stillborn calf?<\/h3>\n<p>The humpback mother, filmed off Palm Beach on Australia&#8217;s Gold Coast in July 2025, stayed with her stillborn calf on the sea floor, touched it with her head and fin, lay still beside it and kept looking at it. A second adult &#8220;escort&#8221; whale stayed nearby. Researchers watched for at least two hours and believe she may have stayed for several hours or even days. The findings were published in the journal Discover Animals in September 2026.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Why do grieving animals stay with the body?<\/h3>\n<p>Nobody knows exactly why grieving animals stay with the body of one who has died. Researchers generally link the behaviour to a strong bond between the animals, such as the bond between a mother and her calf. Anthropologist Barbara J. King has suggested that grief may be present when an animal that had a close bond with another changes its normal routine after that other animal dies.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How can I support someone whose baby was stillborn?<\/h3>\n<p>The most helpful thing is usually to stay with the grieving parent rather than try to explain the loss. Say the baby&#8217;s name if the baby had one, avoid phrases such as &#8220;everything happens for a reason&#8221; or &#8220;at least you didn&#8217;t get to know them,&#8221; and keep checking in for weeks and months afterwards. 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A humpback whale mother was filmed staying beside her stillborn calf on the sea floor for hours. What scientists can and can&#8217;t say about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":115919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226,3708],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bgodinspired-science-news","category-nature-and-creation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115920"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115921,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115920\/revisions\/115921"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}