Do Whales and Dolphins Grieve Their Dead?

A female humpback whale swims slowly next to her dead newborn. She repeatedly dives towards it, touches it with her head and pectoral fin, and returns to almost the same place at the surface. Hours pass, but she does not leave.

Such behaviour inevitably raises a question: Is the whale grieving?

A newly published study describes this encounter off Australia's Gold Coast as the first detailed scientific documentation of a female humpback attending her stillborn calf. The researchers are careful about what they can conclude, but say the observations raise the possibility of grief-like responses in baleen whales.

A mother stays with her calf.

The encounter transpired in July 2025, when researchers noticed two adult humpbacks lingering about 1km offshore. Underwater observations showed a dead newborn calf on the seabed and identified one adult as its presumed mother. Another adult, described as an escort, remained nearby.

The mother repeatedly approached and touched the calf, and at times positioned herself eye-to-eye beside it. Rather than travelling on, she kept circling, making short dives and returning to the same spot.

The observation lasted several hours. Two adult humpbacks were reportedly seen in the area over the next two days, although researchers could not confirm they were the same animals.

This behaviour differed from many observations involving dolphins and other toothed whales. The humpback did not attempt to carry the calf or push it towards the surface. Whether that means she recognised that the calf was dead cannot be established.

Carrying a calf for 11 days

A more conspicuous example unfolded this year near Bunbury in Western Australia.

Researchers from Geographe Marine Research observed a female dolphin known as Fraggle carrying her dead, two-week-old calf. She repeatedly balanced or pushed the body as she travelled, while other dolphins sometimes remained around her.

Fraggle continued carrying the calf for 11 days, even as the carcass deteriorated. It was the fourth calf she had lost in seven years; none of her calves is known to have survived.

Another observation, published in July, considerably widens the geographical picture. Researchers using a drone in the eastern Canadian Arctic documented an adult female killer whale carrying a dead calf by its pectoral fins. Previously published examples of such behaviour in killer whales had largely come from the eastern North Pacific.

Perhaps the best-known case remains southern resident killer whale J35, or Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf for 17 days and more than 1,500km in 2018. She was observed carrying another dead calf in 2025.

What does the behaviour mean?

Scientists have a deliberately less emotive term for much of this: post-mortem attentive behaviour. It falls within a wider category known as epimeletic behaviour—care or attention directed towards another animal that is distressed, injured, dying or dead.

It can include remaining beside a carcass, touching or guarding it, carrying it, or repeatedly trying to bring a dead calf to the surface.

Such responses are not exceptional curiosities. A major review examined 78 published records involving 20 cetacean species. Dolphins accounted for more than 90 per cent of those observations, and among cases where the sex was known, three-quarters involved adult females attending dead calves or juveniles.

Some research groups have encountered the behaviour repeatedly. In Greece's Ambracian Gulf, Tethys Research Institute scientists have, over nearly two decades, documented several bottlenose dolphin mothers attending dead calves. In one well-documented case in 2017, a known female repeatedly carried, lifted and pushed her dead calf during approximately 90 minutes of observation. Researcher Joan Gonzalvo reported having witnessed similar behaviour on three previous occasions in the same population.

The pattern is consistent with the extraordinarily strong bonds between cetacean mothers and their young. But that does not, by itself, tell us what a mother is experiencing.

Some behaviour may begin as an attempt to rescue an unresponsive calf. A mother may continue caregiving behaviour that was adaptive moments earlier, when the calf was alive. Researchers have also considered whether animals recognise that an offspring has died, or whether they may struggle to accept or comprehend the change.

Is it grief?

This is where observation gives way to interpretation.

We cannot ask a whale what it feels, and behaviours that resemble human mourning do not prove an equivalent subjective experience. Even the humpback researchers caution that the mother's behaviour could reflect emotional distress, maternal attachment, confusion, as well as instinctive caregiving.

Yet, caution works in both directions. The inability to demonstrate grief directly is not evidence that cetaceans cannot experience something analogous.

Long-term carrying of a decomposing calf is especially fascinating because the behaviour can become energetically costly without providing an obvious, practical benefit. Researchers studying cetacean responses to death have consequently included grief, or difficulty “letting go” following the loss of a strong social bond, among the plausible explanations.

Another problem is that much of what happens at sea goes unseen.

Post-mortem behaviour appears much more frequently in scientific reports involving dolphins than baleen whales, but that may partly reflect visibility. Dead whale calves can sink, observations of births and neonatal deaths are rare, and interactions occurring below the surface can easily pass unnoticed.

The Gold Coast observation is therefore significant, not because it shows a humpback whale grieving, but because it documents behaviour scientists have rarely had the chance to study in baleen whales.

Whether we choose to call that grief remains an open question. What is increasingly difficult to dismiss is the underlying observation: some whales and dolphins respond to the death of their young with prolonged, persistent attention that reflects the strength of the bond that existed while the calf was alive.