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 caring for her deceased newborn calf.
The encounter offers a rare window into one of the least understood aspects of whale behaviour: how these highly social animals respond to death.
And it raises the question: do whales, and other highly social animals such as elephants, grieve?
Caring creatures
Humpback whales are famous for their spectacular migrations and acrobatic breaches. However, they are equally remarkable for the way they respond to other animals in distress.
Humpback whales often defend their calves from killer whales. Researchers have also observed them remaining alongside whales that are injured or entangled in nets, circling them, resting nearby and attempting to assist. Humpback whales may even intervene when killer whales attack seals, sea lions and grey whale calves.
These responses of care and attention are known as epimeletic behaviour and are common among cetaceans, a group of marine mammals including whales, dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins and killer whales often remain close to distressed companions, evidence of their strong social bonds. These animals may even risk their own lives for others. This happened in April off Scotland’s northwest coast, when multiple pilot whales became stranded after following a birthing female.
Female killer whales have been seen carrying their dead calves for hours, days and even weeks.Lazareva/Getty
Killer whale mothers have repeatedly been observed carrying their dead calves for hours, days and, in exceptional cases, weeks. The most famous example is the killer whale Tahlequah, who in 2018 carried her dead calf for 17 days over more than 1,500 kilometres. Scientists have observed similar behaviour in pilot whales and dolphins.
Such prolonged responses illustrate the strength of the bond between mother and calf. Maternal instincts and hormonal changes after birth may contribute to mothers remaining with their deceased offspring. But exactly what the animals understand about death remains unknown.
Until now, scientists have almost exclusively documented these epilemetic behaviours towards deceased calves in toothed whales. The research on baleen whales, including humpback whales, is scarce. This is likely because dead newborn baleen whales often sink quickly, making it extremely difficult to observe such cases.
Humpback whale mothers give birth after almost a year of pregnancy and spend the next few months feeding their calf with nutrient-rich milk. Right after the delivery, mothers often lift their calf to the surface to help it take its first breath. During the first months of its life, a calf relies entirely on its mother for nourishment, protection and guidance during migration.
Tragically, some calves don’t survive. This may be due to disease, pollutants or a mother’s lack of fat reserves that help female whales cope better with pregnancy and better care for their calves.
Our new study aimed to help fill this research gap.
We observed two adult whales off the Gold Coast of northeast Australia. The two whales stayed in the same area for several hours, after what appeared to have been a stillbirth. The female humpback whale released an ammoniac membrane shortly after the birth, but a placenta was not seen.
Underwater footage revealed the calf resting motionless on the seafloor while the presumed mother repeatedly approached it. She remained close to the calf, continuing to touch it with her head and pectoral fin. A second adult whale, likely an escort, also stayed nearby.
The humpback mother did not try to lift the calf to the ocean’s surface. This may indicate that she recognised the calf had died or was unable to carry it up from the seabed.
Members of the public reported two adult humpback whales remaining in the area over the next two days. However, our research team could not confirm they were the same animals.
A humpback whale mother attending her deceased calf.
Do whales grieve?
To our knowledge, this is the first detailed scientific study of a humpback whale mother attending her deceased newborn calf. It provides crucial insight into how baleen whales cope with death.
Many of the behaviours we observed – including remaining close to the calf and suspending normal behaviours such as travelling or socialising with other whales – resemble how other species respond to death. Elephants, great apes and some toothed whale species care for dead offspring in similar ways.
However, we can’t directly measure the emotional state of whales. The behaviours we observed could represent grief, but they could also reflect maternal attachment, confusion or instinctive caregiving. For this reason, researchers use broader terms – such as post-mortem attentive behaviour – rather than concluding that whales grieve in the human sense.
Nevertheless, these behaviours reveal that humpback whales maintain strong maternal bonds even after the death of a calf. Our study suggests similar cases may have gone unnoticed because scientists rarely observe whale births at sea.
In good news, researchers are increasingly able to observe these animals as whale populations recover and scientific equipment makes at-sea studies more feasible.
So while there’s much more to learn about whales, their emotional lives may be infinitely more complex than we once imagined.
Elephants care for their offspring in similar ways to whales.wrangel/Getty
Olaf Meynecke receives funding from a private charitable trust through the Whales & Climate Research Program. He is affiliated with the NGO Humpbacks & Highrises.
Following a series of major disasters and inquiries that questioned New Zealand’s capacity to deal with them, the new Emergency Management Act 2026 is the most significant improvement in more than two decades.
But legislation only tells part of the story.
Our research into how organisations across New Zealand’s emergency management system interact suggests effective coordination also depends on something less visible – the relationships between people and organisations expected to work together.
Emergency management relies on national, regional and local structures, designated agencies, plans and defined responsibilities which provide necessary authority and accountability. But disasters rarely remain within these boundaries.
The 2023 Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle crossed geographic, organisational and infrastructure boundaries. They required numerous organisations to coordinate under uncertain conditions and with incomplete information.
These relationships cannot simply be created when an emergency begins.
Disasters don’t follow organisational charts
Some organisations are formally part of emergency management arrangements. Others become involved because the consequences of a disaster require their expertise, resources or connections.
This means the emergency management system that exists on paper is not necessarily the same as the network that actually responds to a disaster.
For our research, we interviewed 40 participants representing different organisations, sectors and responsibilities. We also used network analysis to examine how participants and organisations are connected. This revealed the importance of relationships, boundaries and key connecting actors.
Our central finding is that relationships matter. Participants identified trust, established relationships, shared learning, regular engagement and understanding other organisations as important conditions for effective collaboration.
Network analysis identified highly connected actors and “brokers” linking groups that might otherwise have limited interaction. These actors can move information across organisational boundaries, helping the wider system adapt when events develop in ways that plans did not anticipate.
But this adaptability can also create vulnerability.
Hidden vulnerability in relying on relationships
When coordination becomes dependent on particular people, relationships can become potential points of fragility. What happens when that person changes role, leaves an organisation or is unavailable during an emergency?
Organisations at the edges of professional networks may similarly struggle to access information or influence decisions, even if they hold local knowledge needed during a disaster.
The barriers our research identified include organisational silos, fragmented information, inconsistent engagement, unclear roles and uneven levels of preparedness.
Creating another committee, rewriting a plan or clarifying a statutory responsibility may be useful. But none automatically produces trust between organisations or creates the relationships required to work effectively under pressure.
Disasters require adaptation
Complex disasters inevitably produce circumstances that cannot be fully predicted. Infrastructure failures can cascade, communities may self-organise, new organisations become involved, and decisions in one part of the system can generate consequences elsewhere.
Research into complex adaptive systems provides a way of understanding how organisations can direct attention towards interactions, feedback and adaptation, rather than operating independently.
From this perspective, some of the most important emergency management capability exists between organisations, rather than within them.
The implementation of the new emergency management act therefore provides an opportunity to consider these relational conditions alongside the formal architecture of the system.
The legislation clarifies roles and responsibilities while retaining an important principle: risks should be managed by those best placed to manage them, at the lowest appropriate level. It also recognises coordination across the wide range of agencies and organisations involved in emergency management.
How the new system is stewarded may therefore be as important as the legislation itself. If stewardship focuses primarily on compliance, structures and standards, it risks overlooking the relational conditions through which coordination occurs.
System stewardship should also strengthen networks, information exchange, shared capability and learning, while ensuring organisations at the edges of the system can participate meaningfully.
None of this suggests formal structures should be abandoned. Legislation, plans, standards and clearly defined responsibilities provide the foundation for emergency management. But they need to be complemented by relationships and adaptive capacity.
The effectiveness of the new act will ultimately be tested during events that cannot be completely anticipated. When that happens, the question will not only be whether organisations understood their statutory responsibilities, but whether they were capable of working together when it mattered.
Todd Miller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Claims that dismantling pollution rules will lower energy bills and have little climate impact are far from convincing
In allowing US power plants to emit any amount of planet-heating pollution they wish to, the Trump administration made two striking claims – that this will cut Americans’ electricity bills and that the pollution itself doesn’t really matter anyway. Both claims struggle to stand up to even basic scrutiny.
On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would erase any limits on emissions from coal and gas plants that are dangerously heating up our planet. This move, which follows a similar dismantling of pollution limits from cars ands trucks, is part of a broader push to eliminate the longstanding legal authority of this, or any future, US administration to deal with the climate crisis.
Exclusive: Plastic surfaces form hotspots with an increase of antibiotic-resistant genes, study finds
Microplastics act like a “Trojan horse” delivering pollutants, pesticides and bacteria through the soil, a five-year multinational research project has found.
The EU-funded project, which has so far resulted in 22 peer-reviewed studies, found microplastics in the soil of all 227 agricultural fields it tested across 11 European countries. The researchers said this poses a global threat, with healthy soils essential for life on Earth.
This year, the European summer has been sweltering. It is unprecedented in many ways, marked by extreme heat, drought and record-breaking fires. Across the continent, fires have consumed hundreds of homes and demanded the evacuation of thousands of people.
Europe’s wine regions have been particularly hard hit, including around France’s Bordeaux region. Aside from the direct dangers of fires, exposure to smoke can give grapes a burnt or ashy flavour, and this smoke taint can discourage people from buying wine from fire-affected regions.
However, it is not only European wineries that are battling increasingly fierce fires. Renowned wine regions across the globe are grappling with the effects of human-caused climate change.
Hotter and drier
Winemakers from across Australia, California, Chile and South Africa are working in warmer, drier conditions than ever before. That also leaves them more vulnerable to destructive fires.
In California, devastating fires in recent years have been exacerbated by a lack of atmospheric moisture, a consequence of climate change. Similarly, in recent decades forest fires have become more frequent in Australia due to global warming.
Our new study investigated what our warming world means for five of Australia’s major wine regions: South Australia’s Barossa Valley, the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Western Australia’s Margaret River region, the Yarra Valley in Victoria, and Tasmania’s Tamar Valley. We analysed rainfall and temperature observations from these regions, dating back to 1940.
Our results show that human-induced climate change has already altered conditions in Australia’s wine regions. Compared with earlier decades, these areas are more likely to be hotter and drier today, including for the peak grapegrowing season around the warmer months of the year. This means winemakers would generally need to move further south or to higher altitudes to chase ideal growing conditions.
Grapegrowers and winemakers are already adapting to a changing climate.
One approach is trying to use water more efficiently, such as by planting cover crops and trialling innovative irrigation systems. To respond to temperature changes, some winemakers are growing different types of grapes. In Chile’s Biobío Valley, for example, warmer temperatures may mean grape varieties that thrive in heat, such as semillon or tempranillo, grow better than those that have traditionally been grown there, including pinot noir and riesling.
Growers can also shift their vineyards elsewhere. This adaptation strategy was the focus of the second part of our latest study. Using climate models, we identified regions that in future may have the ideal climate for growing today’s most popular and widespread grape varieties.
Our results for Western Australia, for example, show nowhere in the state is likely to develop a similar future climate to what Margaret River used to have. The nearest place would be the Grampians region in Victoria, on the opposite side of the country.
This shows that climate change could lead to the emergence of wine regions in new places, as is already happening overseas. For example, climate change is allowing some English grapegrowers to cultivate grapes previously limited to the Champagne region of France and to rapidly expand the United Kingdom’s wine-making sector. In Australia, climate change could also benefit Tasmania by making local conditions more favourable for wine production.
Grapegrowers are already grappling with immediate climate-related concerns, including whether a particular vineyard will survive a single hot summer or a destructive wildfire.
However, we must must also consider the long-term survival of existing wine regions worldwide. To allow these areas to keep producing grapes and wine, we need to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. Winemakers can also try to adapt to climate change by considering more heat-tolerant grape varieties or relocating to a different region.
Alongside global warming, grapegrowers and wine producers must consider other climate factors. This includes the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a major climate pattern characterised by changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures and winds.
This year, forecasts suggest the emerging El Niño might be the strongest on record by a large margin. In Australia, we typically might expect these El Niño conditions to increase the chance of hot, dry weather in spring and summer, creating more hazardous fire conditions in southern and eastern Australia.
Although this El Niño is loading the dice for an increased chance of hotter, drier weather, it is important to remember there always remains potential for wet conditions in some regions. And this potentially record-breaking El Niño, combined with global warming and hotter than normal global ocean temperatures, means in many ways we are in uncharted territory.
When wine lovers of the future uncork a bottle, they should not have to taste undertones of smoke and ash, or other signs we did not protect our vineyards from climate change. Rather, they should savour the flavour of each glass, knowing growers adapted as well as possible to our rapidly changing climate.
Andrew Dowdy receives funding from the University of Melbourne and the Australian Research Council, including as a member of the Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.
Hamish Clarke receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Kathiana Luk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
