The mother’s designation, in the follow-up records kept by the researchers monitoring her, is J35. His name is Tahlequah. She is a member of the southern resident killer whale population that lives in the Salish Sea between Washington State and British Columbia and, at the time of the events described in the title of this article, was approximately twenty and later twenty-six years old. What he did in the summer of 2018 caught the attention of enough people around the world that the behavior received a nickname within a week. The duel tour. It was difficult to observe it, it was difficult to look away and for anyone, scientist or not, to talk about it without resorting to the vocabulary of human grief. What most reports at the time didn’t land on was that the same whale, six and a half years later, would do it again. What Tahlequah Did, Both Times According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official report on the 2025 event, posted on the Division of Fisheries’ website in January of that year, Tahlequah gave birth to her calf J61 sometime in late December 2024. The Whale Research Center first observed the new mother and calf together on December 20. Concerns about the calf’s health arose almost immediately. J61 was underweight, potentially premature, and spending unusual amounts of time underwater in what researchers interpreted as unsuccessful breastfeeding attempts. By New Year’s Eve, the calf was dead. He had lived about a week. Investigators first spotted Tahlequah carrying his body off Alki Point in West Seattle on December 31, 2024. From there he moved with the rest of the J group through the waters of the Salish Sea, toward Vancouver Island, across the international border, and back through the San Juan Islands. She was still carrying the body on January 10 when investigators relocated her to Victoria, British Columbia. He continued to carry the body for at least sixteen days in total. No one has a precise final count of exactly when it stopped, because the sighting record has gaps, but the behavior was documented in enough separate observations over enough consecutive days for the pattern to be unmistakable. This was, from every observable angle, the same thing she had done in 2018. If you like learning about the weird and wonderful customs of our animal kingdom, it’s worth watching this video about something truly unique that only whales do: The above event began on July 24, 2018. Tahlequah gave birth to a calf off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. Ken Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research, was one of the first to see the newborn alive. He lived for about half an hour. Moments after the calf’s death, Tahlequah began balancing the body on its rostrum, meaning the front of its head, and pushing it up through the water each time it began to sink. He wore it like this for seventeen consecutive days. Traveling with the J pod, he covered a distance that the Whale Research Center eventually estimated to be more than a thousand miles across the Salish Sea. He finally released the body around August 11. And then, as far as any observer could see, it returned to the capsule’s normal behavior. The 2025 event followed the same physical pattern in almost every respect. Body balanced on head. Pushed repeatedly to the surface as it began to sink. Sustained for several consecutive days of ordinary capsule movement. The duration was slightly shorter than in 2018, but remains exceptional in the primary literature on cetacean post-mortem behavior. And the geography was the same. Tahlequah made the same slow journey across the Salish Sea and appeared to cry in the same specific way, in the same waters, seven years later. What Science Really Says She’s Doing The word grief is where things get really difficult. What Tahlequah did seems, to almost every human observer, like grief. The question of whether this is really mourning, in the sense we give it when we use the word about ourselves, is one about which the marine mammal literature has been carefully cautious for years. According to an analysis by Dr. Joe Gaydos, chief scientific officer of the SeaDoc Society, first published during the 2018 event and shared again in 2025 when it happened again, what Tahlequah did fits a broader pattern of behavior documented in many long-lived, socially complex mammals. Cetacean researchers have a term for it. Post-mortem attentive behavior, sometimes called epimeletic behavior, which refers to any sustained interaction between a living animal and the body of a recently deceased member of its own social group. It has been recorded in dolphins, sperm whales, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas and multiple species of primates. Mothers carrying dead babies for prolonged periods have been documented in gelada baboons, Japanese macaques, and mountain gorillas, among others. What made the 2018 Tahlequah event unusual, in the main literary record, was not the fact that she was carrying the body of her calf. It was the duration. Seventeen days is exceptional. Most documented cases of post-mortem transport of cetaceans last a few hours or a few days at most. And what makes the 2025 event unusual in a different sense is simply that it happened to the same individual. Repeated cases of the same woman engaging in the same long-term behavior after successive losses are, according to the currently published record, almost unheard of. Whether the underlying emotional experience is pain in the human sense is a question that researchers working with these animals mostly refuse to answer definitively. What they will say is that the parts of the orca’s brain responsible for memory, learning and emotional processing are highly developed. That southern resident killer whales live in extraordinarily close matrilineal social groups, with strong lifelong bonds between mothers, daughters, siblings and cousins. That the loss of a calf, particularly in a population that is already critically endangered and has had almost no successful births in recent years, is not an abstract event for the surviving mother. And behavior like that displayed by Tahlequah is consistent with, though not in itself proof of, what may be the orca’s equivalent of prolonged mourning. The broader context behind the whole story is worth honestly mentioning. The southern resident killer whale population is currently down to approximately seventy-four individuals and has been in slow decline for decades. Their main food source, Chinook salmon, has plummeted across most of the Pacific Northwest. The underwater noise of shipping traffic in the Salish Sea interferes with their hunting. The contaminants are concentrated in their fat. Calf mortality in the population is disproportionately high, and successful births have become so rare that each one is a small event and each loss is large. J35, in group records maintained by the Whale Research Center, has now had four documented pregnancies and only one surviving calf. Of the two who died as newborns, she carried both. What the coverage keeps kicking around, without even deciding, is that whatever Tahlequah is doing in the water when he pushes a dead calf to the surface, he’s doing it in front of an audience that recognizes something in him. Grief may or may not be the technically correct scientific vocabulary. It is, based on the cumulative observation of anyone who has seen her do it, the closest word most languages have to describing what the behavior looks like, and possibly the closest word to what the behavior actually is. Kiran Athar writes about biology, animal behavior, and the ordinary corners of the natural world where the two intersect. This article is based on institutional reports from NOAA Fisheries and analyzes published by the SeaDoc Society, along with primary observations from the Center for Whale Research.
