Tahlequah, or J35, carries her dead calf in the waters of Puget Sound on Wednesday. Candice Emmons/NOAA Fisheries West Coast AP

Though the baby was no longer breathing, the mother couldn’t bring herself to let go.

She nudged her nose under her lifeless newborn, laboring to keep it above the gray water of Puget Sound. She couldn’t rest, or stop to eat, and she had to dive deep to retrieve her baby’s body every time it slipped. The mother’s sister and 4-year-old son swam nearby. Scientists watched from a distance, their hearts breaking at a scene they had witnessed once before.

This was not the mother’s first time losing a child. In 2018, the endangered orca known as Tahlequah carried the body of her dead calf for at least 17 days, traversing more than 1,000 miles of ocean in what scientists and observers interpreted as an unprecedented act of mourning.

Now she is grieving again.

“It’s devastating to see her go through this,” said Shawn Larson, a senior conservation research manager at the Seattle Aquarium who studied Tahlequah’s sorrowful swim in 2018.

“Her instincts and emotions are to care for this baby more than she cares for herself,” Larson said. “She does that even when she likely knows the baby is dead.”

A MOTHER’S GRIEF

Tahlequah, who is known to scientists as J35, is one of just a few dozen southern resident killer whales — an imperiled group of orcas that was only last year identified as a distinct species. The whales live in close-knit pods led by matriarchs and spend their entire lives in the Salish Sea, off the coast of Washington and British Columbia. But their population was depleted by captures for marine park exhibits in the 1960s and ’70s. Despite being added to the endangered species list in 2005, their numbers have continued to dwindle due to ship disturbances, pollution and the precipitous decline of their main food source: Chinook salmon.

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believe that Tahlequah gave birth to her newest calf — a daughter — on Dec. 20. They don’t know precisely why the young whale died less than two weeks later, but it had been clear that the orange-tinged newborn was struggling, according to NOAA wildlife biologist Brad Hanson. The calf was tossing its head as if struggling to breathe and was repeatedly nudged to the surface by its mother, Hanson said.

When researchers revisited the pod on New Year’s Eve, they found the calf’s body draped across her mother’s head. Tahlequah has continued to carry her lost child ever since, always accompanied by other members of her pod.

Only Tahlequah knows what she is going through — what instinct or emotion compels her to hold on to a roughly 300-pound carcass for days on end.

But Joe Gaydos, science director for the SeaDoc Society conservation program at the University of California at Davis, said there is every reason to believe the mother is mourning, just as a human mother would.

“We have the same neurotransmitters that they have, we have the same hormones they have, why shouldn’t we have the same emotions they have?” he told reporters. “We don’t have the market cornered on emotions.”

Scientists have observed similar grieving behavior in at least six other species of dolphins and whales, according to a 2016 study in the Journal of Mammalogy. Elephants are known to visit the remains of dead family members, sometimes trying to lift their carcasses or stroking their sun-bleached bones.

But there is something especially charismatic about orcas, whale researchers say. The highly intelligent and social animals consistently stun scientists and captivate the rest of us with their antics: teaming up to hunt the world’s largest fish, donning “salmon hats” while swimming, ramming into boats in acts that might be aggression or play.

“They’re big, they’re awe-inspiring, they’re beautiful,” Larson said. “The more we learn about them, the more we see how they are like us.”

Scientists have found that orca populations communicate in unique dialects and exhibit distinctive cultural practices. For example, the physically and behaviorally similar northern resident orcas, which live primarily off the coast of British Columbia, spend large amounts of time rubbing their bodies on beach pebbles — a mysterious activity their southern cousins have never adopted. Meanwhile, southern residents are the only orcas known to form “superpods” — boisterous family reunions the entire population attends.

And no animal has been observed mourning a death for as long as Tahlequah, Larson said. Humans can’t help but empathize with that lingering pain. We see in her a mirror of ourselves.

A SPECIES IN PERIL

But with this second “tour of grief,” said University of Washington biologist Samuel Wasser, Tahlequah is sending a message that is about more than her own suffering.

“It’s one thing to go, ‘oh my god that poor whale,’” he said. “But we need to talk about the issues that made that happen.”

By analyzing hormones in southern resident killer whales’ feces, Wasser has helped show that members of Tahlequah’s species reproduce at some of the lowest rates of any marine mammal. In a 2017 study, he found that 70 percent of detectable pregnancies ended in either miscarriage or infant death. Tahlequah’s pod, called J pod, hasn’t had a calf make it through its first year of life since 2022.

These deaths are a sign of a population in deep distress, Wasser said. The whales’ foraging is frequently interrupted by ship traffic in the busy waters off the Washington coast. Toxic materials, particularly long-lived chemicals called Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), accumulate in their blubber. The Chinook salmon that is their primary prey have dwindled from a combination of habitat loss, climate change, commercial fishing and dam construction, causing the whales to starve.

Wasser’s fecal studies have found high levels of PCBs and the stress hormone cortisol in pregnant females. These clues suggest that the orca mothers aren’t getting enough to eat, causing them to metabolize their own fat and releasing the toxins stored there into their bloodstream. These contaminants can affect the development of a growing fetus, leading to miscarriage or birth defects. They can also end up poisoning a new calf if transmitted through the mothers’ milk.

There is probably no way to know if this is why Tahlequah’s calf died, Wasser acknowledged. Scientists will not take her baby’s body away from her, and if she holds on to it for as long as she did in 2018, it will be too decomposed to analyze by the time she lets go.

“But I think this is a pretty compelling argument based on all the clues we can get,” Wasser said.

Larson suggested that the calf could also have suffered from genetic problems as a result of inbreeding — a by-product of the southern residents’ tiny population size. Or the infant whale may have simply been unlucky, perhaps catching an infection in the womb that she couldn’t fend off.

Whatever the cause, the death of Tahlequah’s daughter is a tragedy for her entire species, Larson said. The whales need new babies, and particularly new females, to boost their dwindling population. Between their 15-18 month gestation period and the demands of nursing, female orcas can give birth to just one calf roughly every five years.

But the Center for Whale Research has observed that many southern resident females are not having babies at all, and those that are reproducing sometimes go more than 10 years between births. Since its peak in the 1990s, the population has fallen by 25 percent to just 73 whales.

Now the species is teetering on the brink of extinction, said the center’s research director, Michael Weiss.

“When we run population viability analyses, there’s a whole bunch of scenarios that don’t result in recovery, and very few that do,” he said.

Washington this year instituted new regulations requiring all boats to stay at least 1,000 yards away from southern residents. State and federal governments have also spent billions of dollars trying to boost Chinook salmon populations by releasing fish from hatcheries and installing fish ladders to help them get around dams, but the species remains in decline, according to a 2023 status update from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

A number of environmental and fishing groups have also called for the removal of dams from the lower Snake River, where the salmon that orcas depend on reproduce. But the proposal is opposed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the dams, as well as several members of Washington’s congressional delegation.

“It’s a really complex situation,” Wasser said. But he believes that removing the dams is “the single biggest thing we can do to recover those salmon and recover the whales.”

OCEAN SENTINELS

The human response to Tahlequah’s grief is in some ways a case study in our capacity for empathy, Larson said. We easily identify with a mother who has lost a child. But can we relate to a wild animal that is struggling to adapt to an increasingly chaotic and hostile environment?

“The orcas are just sentinels,” Larson said. “It comes down to people’s willingness to step in and say enough is enough, and we need to do things differently. … Not only for the health of the fish and the beautiful southern resident killer whales, but also for ourselves.”

She finds hope in the glimmer of good news that came the same day researchers realized Tahlequah had lost her child: Another calf, named J62, had been spotted in the pod.

Experts haven’t determined the young whale’s sex or parentage, but they said it appeared healthy. It was tiny and orange, just like Tahlequah’s daughter. And it was surrounded by the pod’s females — not just its mother, but probably its grandmother, sisters, cousins and aunts. An entire support system of relatives ready to accompany it through life, just as they have accompanied Tahlequah through her youngest daughter’s death.

Dino Grandoni contributed to this report.