Humpback Mother Observed Grieving Stillborn Calf — SkimNews
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- Andrew Mulville of the Sea World Foundation observed a humpback mother with a stillborn calf on 17 July 2025 off the Gold Coast, Queensland — what co-author Olaf Meynecke of Griffith University says is the first known sighting of a humpback stillbirth.
- The mother repeatedly approached the calf, looked at it eye to eye, and touched it with her head and pectoral fin, but notably did not try to push it to the surface as she would with a live newborn — possibly, the authors argue, because she knew it wasn't alive.
- A second adult whale stayed nearby throughout, apparently supporting both mother and dead calf, and members of the public reported seeing the pair in the same location on the two following days.
- Seven humpback neonates and one young whale of unconfirmed age were also found dead in the same southern Queensland region in July 2025, none of them the calf the scientists observed — raising concerns about an unexplained spike in whale deaths.
- Meynecke noted the mother failed to deliver her placenta, which he said may have also placed her at additional risk; the researchers have uploaded photos of her distinctive fluke to a database of 16,000 individuals in hopes of identifying her in future seasons.
- Humpback mothers are increasingly calving in southern Queensland — hundreds of kilometres south of their traditional Great Barrier Reef breeding grounds — and scientists say they don't yet know what's driving the shift.
- Rebecca Dunlop of the University of Queensland cautioned that terms like "grief," "emotion," and "distress" must be used carefully since they cannot be definitively assigned to the observed behavior, and that more sightings are needed to test the hypothesis.
Why it matters: Researchers are sounding alarms about a possible surge in humpback calf deaths — seven neonates and one young whale were found dead in the same southern Queensland waters in July 2025 alone. With calving grounds shifting hundreds of kilometres south of the Great Barrier Reef for reasons no one can yet explain, scientists now have both an emerging mortality pattern and the first behavioral baseline to investigate what is driving it.
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