A camera lowered off the Gold Coast captured the first documented humpback stillbirth

Stillbirth is common in mammals. Whale stillbirths are rarely observed, and Meynecke says that to his knowledge it had never been witnessed in humpbacks before ^[33]. Part of the reason is the newborn's body. Humpback calves do not carry enough blubber to float, so without an adult lifting them they sink, and Meynecke said a lifeless calf reaches the seabed immediately after birth, where it is almost impossible to spot from a distance ^[9].

From the surface there was not much to see. Two adults milled in one spot, diving, vocalising and rolling ^[4], and one went vertical with its tail pointing up ^[5]. Mulville, a rescue boat captain with the Sea World Foundation, said he was totally surprised once he worked out what was happening; at first sight he had thought it was just two whales resting on the surface, but their behaviour was unusual ^[30].

Underwater, the mother stayed close and kept returning. "She was repeatedly diving down for short times and swimming next to the calf, then resting next to it on the floor for about a minute, even moving the pectoral fin over the calf, then diving up again," Meynecke said ^[13]. The comparison group is the toothed whales, where postmortem attendance is well documented and where mothers have been seen raising dead calves to the surface ^[31][11]. "Unlike reports of toothed whales where mothers have been observed lifting their dead calves to the surface, this humpback whale mother showed prolonged postmortem behavior and attention toward her deceased calf under the surface," Meynecke said ^[12].

Duration limits what can be claimed from it. The behaviour was recorded for at least 90 minutes ^[14] inside an observation of about two hours, after which the crew left ^[15], so roughly three-quarters of the time anyone was watching ^[16]. It did not obviously end there: on each of the next two days, people on shore reported the same two adults in the same place ^[17]. The second animal was an escort, probably a female of similar age to the mother, though the researchers did not confirm that ^[18].

Meynecke is careful with the word grief. "It's really important to not humanise an encounter like this," he told New Scientist. "But then also to understand that it's a mammal, and we have evidence of, not necessarily grief, but the really dramatic change of behaviour that we see in other mammals such as elephants when they lose a member of their group or when they lose their calves." ^[19]

Rebecca Dunlop at the University of Queensland says descriptive case study reports such as this one "run the risk of anthropomorphising observed behaviours" ^[20]. She adds that the study "does present a balanced argument of how the observed behaviour could be interpreted" and notes that "grief", "emotion" and "distress" "must be used with caution since we cannot definitively assign these terms to the observed behaviour" ^[21]. Testing the emotional interpretation, she says, would take "more data and more occurrences" ^[22].