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Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
- gigatexal 12d agoAny parent here who has known this loss can relate. Didn’t think I’d see this on HN but yeah this is heartbreaking.
- zer00eyz 12d agoOrcas have also been seen to carry their dead calf's around. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-resident-killer-whale-calf-dies-days-after-birth-second-newborn-appears https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-reside...
- shuwix 12d ago[dead]
- SapporoChris 12d ago"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days." Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
- adzm 12d agoI'm confused by how that is speculation.
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- SapporoChris 12d agoThe key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.
- pastel8739 12d agoRather, the word “possibly” indicates uncertainty, the very foundation of science.
- pinkmuffinere 12d agoAre you trying to say that including the weasely claims makes the article better and more scientific? You are “possibly” right.
- nexie 12d agoFair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours). You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
- krisoft 12d ago> They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas? Why possibly days and not possibly weeks? > but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down. > it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
- Laakeri 12d agoI'd say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.
- officehero 12d agoBut they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It's unnecessarily ambiguous.
- bell-cot 12d agoThe article calls the data an "observation", made by the captain of a Rescue Boat from Sea World Foundation. From a peek at https://seaworldfoundation.com.au/rescue https://seaworldfoundation.com.au/rescue it seems clear that their job is rescue, not research. Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
- kingkawn 12d agoYour pedantry and rigid lack of any insight is not representative of science just your own intellectual flaws
- vor_ 12d ago[dead]
- krisoft 12d agoI disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that. What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one. And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen. The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
- LastTrain 12d agoResearch requires pedantry.
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- sehw 12d ago[dead]
- georgemcbay 12d agoBlows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal. Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
- card_zero 12d agoDo LLMs grieve?
- georgemcbay 12d agoNope. They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
- card_zero 12d agoDo whales grieve?
- georgemcbay 12d ago> Do whales grieve? Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence. So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
- nexie 12d agoI hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
- georgemcbay 12d ago> I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well! Thanks, stranger. I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life. Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place. Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
- jibal 12d ago> indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calf Yeah, that's not grieving.
- seri4l 12d agoPaper [0] [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9
- imjonse 12d agoUnsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
- isodev 12d agoApplies to every living thing with a limbic system. So yes, that steak or chicken nuggets...
- TeMPOraL 12d agoHow? Did limbic system evolve as "fear of death" or "peer recognition and perception of shared fate" system? (Not doubting the chicken nuggets, just wondering about the lower/simpler end of the scale.)
- mettamage 12d agoI mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is a strong selector for evolutionary fitness, which it probably is. Certain species go the other way probably and become more like a super organism but mammals seem quite individualized compared to ants for example.
- pixl97 12d ago>"peer recognition and perception of shared fate" While plants may not fear in the manner that we do, they can chemically signal when one becomes damaged or stressed and cause physiological changes in plants that are not sharing the same conditions.
- Kuyawa 12d agoAnts don't walk in line over the stove. It may not be fear, but there is something hardwired that tells them not too, or they would be extinct long ago Applies to all living organisms
- TrainedMonkey 12d ago
- ButlerianJihad 12d agoWhen I was a little boy, with XY chromosomes, I enjoyed vinyl records and record players. I came across a nice flex-disc, from a magazine such as National Geographic, and it was full of whalesong, recorded with underwater microphones from the deep. (I am sorry for posting this a day too late to Talk Like a Pirate...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family. And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations. Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.
- eks391 12d agoGreat idea. In going to start using whale speak during spotting connections
- antoni4040 12d agoI come here to read about the impending AI apocalypse, not feel feelings.
- Kim_Bruning 12d agoThat's two ethology stories on HN on one day. Interesting as news for nerds, but it is becoming relevant to more nerds than just me ;-) . (the other one is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775579 "do birds have accents")
- genxy 11d agoWhat I find fascinating is how much the bird brain expands and contracts wrt to how much it sings and what songs it learns.
- earth-tattoo 12d ago[flagged]
- throwaway-11-1 12d agoWhat is your goal with this comment?
- earth-tattoo 12d ago[flagged]
- tomhow 11d agoWe've banned this account.
- brewcejener 12d ago[dead]