Whales hold ‘funerals’ when their young die

MOTHER whales and dolphins grieve for lost loved ones in long vigils, say researchers.

Several females have been spotted swimming with the dead bodies of their offspring, surrounded by other adults, for days at a time.

The best explanation for this is that they are mourning, the researchers believe.

‘Adults mourning their dead young is a common and globally widespread behaviour in long-lived and highly sociable species of mammals,’ the team from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy wrote in the Journal of Mammalogy.

The adult whales and dolphins had in many cases carried the corpses for a long time, the researchers said after studying 14 separate incidents. The study’s co-author Melissa Reggente told National Geographic: ‘They are in pain and stressed. They know something is wrong.’

Although the behaviour among the mammals was common, the way in which they chose to grieve their loss varied.

One female killer whale off San Juan Islands, Washington, was seen trying to keep her dead calf at surface level, balancing it on top of her head.

In the North Atlantic, whales pushed bodies along with their fins, while a pod of short-finned pilot whales in the same ocean made a protective circle around an adult with a dead youngster. In the Red Sea, a spinner dolphin was seen to push a dead calf towards a boat.