A video recorded off Queensland’s Gold Coast shows a presumed mother humpback whale repeatedly touching and staying beside her stillborn calf. The authors of a 2026 study describe the behavior as post-mortem attention and say it may reflect maternal attachment or a grief-like response—but the footage cannot establish what the whale felt.
What does the humpback whale video show?
The encounter took place on July 17, 2025, near Palm Beach reef off Queensland’s Gold Coast. Two adult humpback whales were first seen milling near the surface. Underwater footage then showed a small calf on the seafloor, with no visible movement or respiration. One adult, identified by the researchers as a presumed female and likely the mother, approached the calf, touched it with her head and pectoral fin, and rested beside it, including in an eye-to-eye position.
The observers recorded activity from about 8 a.m. until they left at 10 a.m. Their underwater recordings totalled about 15 minutes, including 12 minutes in which the stillborn calf was visible. The exact time of birth was unknown. The researchers saw no attempt to lift the calf to the surface. They recorded vocalizations but could not tell whether they came from the presumed mother, the other adult, or both.
Two adult whales were reported in the same area on each of the next two days. However, the animals could not be individually identified, so those sightings do not establish that the same mother remained with the calf or stayed in the area continuously.
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Does the video prove that whales grieve?
No. It records behavior, not a whale’s subjective experience. In their paper, marine biologists Jan-Olaf Meynecke and Andrew Mulville call the actions “post-mortem attentive behavior” and say they may indicate maternal attachment and a grief-like response. They also caution that emotional distress, confusion, or instinctive caregiving could offer other explanations. The footage cannot determine which, if any, best describes the whale’s experience.
Meynecke told Science News that researchers should avoid projecting human experience onto whales: “the whale is experiencing their world in a completely different form and shape.” The careful conclusion is that the behavior is consistent with a bond or response to the calf’s death; it is not proof that the whale understood the death or grieved as a person might.
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Why is the observation unusual?
The authors describe this as the first detailed, documented report of post-mortem attendance in a humpback whale. Published reports of similar attention to dead individuals are more common for toothed whales, while documentation in baleen whales is sparse. That difference does not show that baleen whales never behave this way: a dead newborn may sink, and births—and the period immediately afterward—are difficult to observe. A behavior that is rarely recorded may be rare, hard to witness, or both.
The paper also reports seven deceased humpback neonates and one deceased young whale of unconfirmed age class in its review of the broader region in July 2025. These are study-specific regional observations, not an estimate of mortality across humpback populations.
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What the study can—and cannot—tell us
The footage makes a rare behavior observable: an adult whale repeatedly attended to and touched a calf that showed no visible signs of life. It does not reveal the whale’s thoughts, establish why she acted as she did, or prove that the same animals were present on later days. The authors argue that systematic documentation of rare neonatal deaths and post-mortem behavior can help researchers investigate their cognitive, emotional, and evolutionary significance.
The scientific account is Meynecke and Mulville’s “First documentation of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) post-mortem attendance of a stillborn,” published in Discover Animals on September 16, 2026: read the paper. A report with the video and an interview with Meynecke appeared in Science News on October 1, 2026: read the coverage.
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Should people try to see or approach whales?
No. This research encounter is not an invitation to seek out or approach whales. Queensland Government guidance covers responsible whale watching from tours and land-based vantage points and says not to touch whales. Follow the official Queensland whale-watching guidance.
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