Weeping whales: why one humpback whale mother stayed beside her dead newborn

By Olaf Meynecke, Research Fellow in Marine Science and Manager Whales & Climate Program, Griffith University

It was a tragic sight.

One day last July, a newborn humpback whale calf lay motionless on the seafloor, just a kilometre off Australia’s Gold Coast. The encounter was captured through underwater video.

For more than an hour, the mother repeatedly returned to the same spot, gently touching the calf with her head and pectoral fin and resting beside it eye-to-eye. Our new research suggests this is the first described case of a humpback whale mother…

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