Orca ends her ‘tour of grief’ after carrying dead calf for weeks
A grieving orca whale has released the body of her dead calf after carrying it for at least 17 days through the Pacific Ocean in an unprecedented act of mourning, according to researchers.
On Saturday, Tahlequah, as the mother has come to be called, was observed swimming without the body of her calf, said Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research.
“Her tour of grief is now over and her behaviour is remarkably frisky,” read an update on the centre’s website.
The centre said whale-watchers near Vancouver had reported seeing Tahlequah without her calf’s body last week, but Saturday was the first time researchers were able to confirm those reports.
Tahlequah’s mourning had astonished and devastated much of the world.
The orca gave birth on July 25 in what should have been a happy milestone for her long-suffering clan.
The pod of killer whales that roams between Vancouver and San Juan Island off Washington state has dwindled to 75 members over the decades. The cause is no mystery: humans have netted up the whales’ salmon, driven ships through their hunting lanes and polluted their water, to the point that researchers fear Tahlequah’s generation may be the last of her family.
The 400-pound, orange-tinted baby that wriggled out of her that morning was the first live birth in the pod since 2015, Chiu wrote. It lived about half an hour.
Studies have found that orcas really do possess high levels of intelligence and empathy, and emotions that may not be totally alien to our own.
So, when Tahlequah did not let her emaciated calf sink to the bottom of the Pacific, but rather balanced it on her head and pushed it along as she followed her pod, researchers thought they understood what was happening.
“You cannot interpret it any other way,” said Deborah Giles, a killer whale biologist with the University of Washington. “This is an animal that is grieving for its dead baby, and she doesn’t want to let it go. She’s not ready.”
That was the beginning of a long funeral procession. “The hours turned into days,” Chiu wrote two days after the death. “And on Thursday she was still seen pushing her baby to the water’s surface.”
And still the next day, and through the weekend, and into the next week and next month.
Researchers with the Canadian and U.S. governments and other organizations tracked her all the while, the Seattle Times wrote. They hoped to capture the calf once Tahlequah finally let go, and discover why it had died — as nearly all the babies in this pod seemed to.
The Center for Whale Research said Tahlequah “vigorously chased a school of salmon with her pod-mates” when researchers spotted her Saturday.