The mother orca nudges her dead calf with her snout, draping it over her head, and gripping its tiny fin with her teeth, to stave off the inevitable.
Just as she did in 2018 — when she spent 17 days carrying another dead calf — the mother orca is clinging to the carcass for as long as possible, before the Puget Sound waves sweep it away.
“It’s so much harder to see now that she has lost another one,” said Brad Hanson, a research scientist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Mr. Hanson said on Thursday that he did not know why the female calf, who lived for a few days during the last weeks of December, had died. The mother, one of only a few dozen of its type of orca, was seen carrying the dead female calf on Wednesday, though might have been doing so for longer.
In 2018, the apparent deep mourning of this orca, identified by researchers as J35 and also known as Tahlequah, became a symbol of the plight of the Southern Resident whales. While orcas sometimes show their grief in similar fashion, scientists considered the time period of Tahlequah’s journey, which covered about 1,000 miles, an outlier.
Tahlequah, who is about 25 years old, went on to have another calf in 2020, her second son, which she is still caring for. She birthed another calf in 2010.
Tahlequah is using much of her energy to cling to the dead calf, which weighs about 300 pounds, and she is unable to forage for food, scientists said during a news briefing on Thursday. They said that her closely knit pod was supporting her. Other female orcas, especially her sister, have been observed to be consistently at her side.
Southern Resident killer whales, one of several distinct orca communities that inhabit the Pacific Northwest, generally stay near British Columbia and Washington State, though some swim north to Alaska and south to California.
The males, which can weigh up to 22,000 pounds, typically live about 30 years, and females, up to 16,000 pounds, survive longer — up to 50 or 60 years.
The death of a female calf is especially difficult, scientists said Thursday, because she could have grown to give birth and help ease the slide in the orcas’ population.
Many orca pregnancies fail, though, and about 50 percent of the calves die in their first year.
The researchers also spotted a new calf on Wednesday, which was born in the same pod. They said that the new calf appears healthy, a ray of hope for the endangered Southern Resident population off the Pacific Northwest. The mother and gender of the new calf is not yet confirmed.
The endangered Southern Resident killer whale population is 73, according to the Center for Whale Research.
The whales have been struggling amid a scarcity of high-quality prey to eat, mainly Chinook salmon. The noise pollution from ships and boats in their habitat and toxic pollutants that make their way up the food chain have also been extremely harmful.
Scientists have been warning that Southern Resident killer whales are on the brink of extinction, so they understand the magnitude of an orca like Tahlequah losing at least two of her four calves.
It’s not surprising to them that she is in mourning, too.
“Over the last few years, we realize that we have the same neurotransmitters that they have,” said Joe Gaydos, science director of the SeaDoc Society at the University of California, Davis.
“We have the same hormones that they have. Why shouldn’t we also have the emotions that they have? We don’t have the market cornered on emotions. So I think it’s fair to say that she is grieving or mourning.”
For now, scientists say, Tahlequah continues to carry the calf, nudging it through the water and diving deep to retrieve it if it falls away, for as long as she can.
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