Video: Dolphin Carries Dead Calf in What Experts Call Mourning

The video is haunting: A dolphin carries the deceased body of her two-week-old calf amid a pod of dolphins south of Perth, Australia.

The footage was posted on July 20 by Geographe Marine Research, a whale conservation organization. The group is familiar with this particular mother, whom it has named Fraggle, and her struggles. She had already lost three other calves, and giving birth to a fourth during winter in the Southern Hemisphere posed an immediate challenge to the calf’s survival.

“We still had hope she had a chance to be a mum again,” the group wrote in a widely shared social media post.

The group proposed that Fraggle’s calf had died of pneumonia.

Different types of dolphins are known to carry their dead offspring for days, if not weeks, said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and the founder of the Whale Sanctuary Project.

“It’s absolutely clear that this is a mother grieving for her child,” Dr. Marino said.

She noted that while other footage of grieving dolphins has been captured, what was notable in this video was the placement of the surrounding dolphins.

“They are close to her,” Dr. Marino said in an interview. She added, “It’s not just her with her dead calf. There’s a recognition on the part of the whole pod that there is something going on here.”

Groups of cetaceans — a term for a marine mammal that includes dolphins and whales — are known for their emotional bonds with one another. That includes birth as well as death. For example, scientists have observed groups of block whales ***isting a mother in giving birth, part of a growing body of research illustrating the depths of community among groups of some nonhuman animals.

Scientists say such expressions of grief are ordinary behavior for cetaceans.

In 2018 an orca named Tahlequah was seen carrying her dead calf near British Columbia for more than two weeks in 2018 over a thousand miles, although that many days was considered an outlier by scientists. She appeared to be in mourning again last year.

Experts say that mothers like Fraggle and Tahlequah appear to desire close contact with the corpse.

“What is most remarkable in these cases is that the mothers don’t have hands and live in an aquatic medium where they have to regularly surface to breathe as well as hunt,” Susana Monsó, a philosopher and the author of “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” wrote in an email. “This makes holding on to the corpse something very difficult and shows a strong motivation on the part of the mother.”

Such behavior is not unique to dolphins or whales. Scientists have doblockented the carrying of infant corpses for extended periods by nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas and baboons, said Abigail McClain, a doctoral candidate at Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University.

“Again and again we see mothers carrying infants for days to weeks, sometimes even when there is evidence that the mother knows the infant has died, which opens the door to some really interesting conversations about grief in nonhuman species,” Ms. McClain wrote in an email.

Lauren Brandkamp, the stranding coordinator at Whale and Dolphin Conservation North America, noted that while humans find these videos interesting, they shouldn’t be surprised.

“It’s a natural behavioral response in animals,” Ms. Brandkamp said. “They form these bonds with their offspring, with other members of their pod or their species. And when a life is lost, they also experience that kind of mourning and sadness.”