In wildlife footage, there’s a certain kind of stillness that means something is wrong. It’s not the stillness of nothing happening, but the kind where you can tell the animal knows something is wrong. When you watch the video taken off of Palm Beach in July 2025, it makes you feel that way. A female humpback whale keeps going down to the ocean floor and touching a small, still body with her head and fin. She then rests next to it for a minute before coming back up. The calf doesn’t move. It didn’t live.
The video was taken by Andrew Mulville, who is a rescue boat captain for the SeaWorld Foundation and was fishing with his son that morning. He saw two adult humpback whales acting strangely close to the surface. They weren’t moving or socializing; they were just going around in a circle. After a while, he saw pieces of an amniotic membrane floating in the water. He knew right away that a baby had been born. What followed was something he wasn’t ready for. He said it was the strangest behavior he’d seen in 25 years of working with sick and stranded whales. He hid a camera underwater to record it.
Since then, what Mulville took that morning has been published in the journal Discover Animals. Dr. Olaf Meynecke, a marine ecologist at Griffith University’s Whales and Climate Research Program, helped write the article. “Post-mortem attentive behavior” is what Meynecke talked about. This is a term that tries to be precise without making assumptions, but it still has some weight to it. The mother whale and a second adult whale, called a “escort,” stayed with the dead baby for at least two hours. Public reports said they saw two adult humpbacks in the same area over the next two days, but it wasn’t clear if they were the same animals.
Meynecke says that only about 20 humpback whale births have been seen and written about in scientific literature. There was no stillborn calf in any of them. Part of the reason is biological: humpback calves don’t have enough fat to float like toothed whale calves do. A calf that was stillborn sinks almost right away. Most of the time, there would be nothing to see on the surface and nothing to write down for researchers. There was a chance that this would not happen again for a very long time. Mulville was there, he had an underwater camera, and the calf had come to rest on the seafloor in shallow enough water to be seen.
More research has been done on toothed whales and dolphins that are grieving. Several times, mothers orcas have been seen carrying dead calves for long periods of time. Although humpbacks are baleen whales, almost no one has ever seen them deal with death or loss in a scientific way that has been written down. Meynecke is careful not to say too much about what the video shows. He says the behavior “suggests at least a strong attachment” to the calf that didn’t make it and “clearly a change of behavior” afterward. The question of whether that is really grief is one that he leaves open.
That warning was echoed by Dr. Vanessa Pirotta, a whale scientist at Macquarie University who wasn’t part of the study. She said it’s important not to anthropomorphize, which means not to apply human emotional frameworks to animal behavior, even when it seems like there are clear similarities. However, she agreed that for a humpback mother carrying a calf for months and then giving birth to one that doesn’t survive, it would probably be a big deal. “What we can do,” she replied, “is learn from observations.”
Today, when more people than ever are in the water with drones and underwater cameras, footage like this is slowly becoming more important. Meynecke sees it as a chance to do something useful. Better records of strange whale behavior could help scientists learn more about how humpbacks deal with stress in general. For example, what does it mean for a whale to be caught in fishing gear, and how long might the psychological effects of that experience last? It’s not a small question. There is a direct link between them and conservation policy and how fishing companies are regulated in areas where whales migrate.
It’s not easy to watch the video, but then again, most honest things that happen in nature aren’t. It’s not noisy. The whale keeps coming back. The only thing that’s left is the chance—not the certainty—that she was trying to figure out something that wouldn’t connect. In the end, it turns out that feeling is hard to explain in terms of pure mechanics.
