The mother’s designation, on the tracking records kept by the researchers who monitor her, is J35. Her name is Tahlequah. She’s a member of the Southern Resident killer whale population that lives in the Salish Sea between Washington state and British Columbia, and she was, as of the events described in the title of this piece, roughly twenty and then twenty-six years old. What she did in the summer of 2018 caught the attention of enough people around the world that the behaviour got a nickname within a week. The Tour of Grief. It was hard to watch, hard to look away from, and hard for anyone, scientist or otherwise, to talk about without reaching for the vocabulary of human bereavement.
What most of the reporting at the time didn’t quite land on is that the same whale would, six and a half years later, do it all over again.
What Tahlequah did, both times
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s official reporting on the 2025 event, published on the Fisheries division’s own website in January of that year, Tahlequah gave birth to her calf J61 sometime in late December 2024. The Center for Whale Research first observed the new mother and calf together on 20 December. Concerns about the calf’s health surfaced almost immediately. J61 was underweight, potentially premature, and spent unusual amounts of time underwater in what the researchers interpreted as attempts to nurse that weren’t succeeding.
By New Year’s Eve, the calf was dead. She’d lived about a week.
Researchers first spotted Tahlequah carrying her body off Alki Point in West Seattle on 31 December 2024. From there she moved with the rest of J pod through the waters of the Salish Sea, up toward Vancouver Island, across the international boundary, and back down through the San Juan Islands. She was still carrying the body on 10 January when researchers relocated her off Victoria, British Columbia. She continued to carry the body for at least sixteen days in total. Nobody has a precise final count for exactly when she stopped, because the sighting record has gaps in it, but the behaviour was documented in enough separate observations across enough consecutive days that the pattern was unmistakable.
This was, from every observable angle, the same thing she’d done in 2018.
If you enjoy learning about the weird and wonderful ways of our animal kingdom, this video on something truly unique only whales do is worth a watch:
The earlier event began on 24 July 2018. Tahlequah gave birth to a female calf off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. Ken Balcomb, the founder of the Center for Whale Research, was among the first to see the newborn alive. She lived for approximately half an hour. Within moments of the calf’s death, Tahlequah began balancing the body on her rostrum, meaning the front of her head, and pushing it upward through the water each time it began to sink. She carried it in this way for seventeen consecutive days. Traveling with J pod, she covered a distance the Center for Whale Research eventually estimated at over one thousand miles across the Salish Sea. She finally released the body on around 11 August. And then, as far as any observer could tell, she returned to ordinary pod behaviour.
The 2025 event followed the same physical pattern in almost every respect. Body balanced on the head. Repeatedly pushed to the surface when it started to sink. Sustained across multiple consecutive days of ordinary pod movement. The duration was slightly shorter than 2018 but still exceptional in the primary literature on cetacean post-mortem behaviour. And the geography was the same. Tahlequah made the same slow loop through the Salish Sea, and appeared to grieve in the same specific way, in the same waters, seven years later.
What the science actually says she’s doing
The word grief is where things get genuinely difficult. What Tahlequah did looks, to almost every human observer, like grief. The question of whether it actually is grief, in the sense we mean when we use the word about ourselves, is one the marine mammal literature has been carefully cautious about for years.
According to an analysis by Dr Joe Gaydos, science director at the SeaDoc Society, first published during the 2018 event and re-shared in 2025 when it happened again, what Tahlequah did fits a broader pattern of behaviour documented across many long-lived, socially complex mammals. Cetacean researchers have a term for it. Post-mortem attentive behaviour, sometimes called epimeletic behaviour, which refers to any sustained interaction between a living animal and the body of a recently deceased member of its own social group. It’s been recorded in dolphins, sperm whales, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, and multiple primate species. Mothers carrying dead infants for extended periods has been documented in gelada baboons, Japanese macaques, and mountain gorillas among others.
What made Tahlequah’s 2018 event unusual, on the primary literature record, wasn’t the fact that she carried her calf’s body. It was the duration. Seventeen days is exceptional. Most documented cases of post-mortem carrying in cetaceans last hours or a few days at most. And what makes the 2025 event unusual in a different way is simply that it happened to the same individual. Repeated cases of the same female performing the same extended-duration behaviour after successive losses are, on the current published record, close to unheard of.
Whether the underlying emotional experience is grief in the human sense is a question the researchers who work with these animals mostly decline to answer definitively. What they will say is that the parts of the killer whale brain responsible for memory, learning, and emotional processing are highly developed. That Southern Resident killer whales live in extraordinarily tight matrilineal social groups, with strong lifelong bonds between mothers, daughters, siblings, and cousins. That the loss of a calf, particularly in an already-critically-endangered population that has had almost no successful births in recent years, is not an abstract event for the surviving mother. And that behaviour of the kind Tahlequah has displayed is consistent with, though not by itself proof of, whatever the killer whale equivalent of prolonged mourning might turn out to be.
The broader context sitting behind the whole story is worth naming honestly. The Southern Resident killer whale population is currently down to approximately seventy-four individuals, and has been in slow decline for decades. Their primary food source, Chinook salmon, has collapsed across most of the Pacific Northwest. Underwater noise from shipping traffic in the Salish Sea interferes with their hunting. Pollutants concentrate in their blubber. Calf mortality in the population runs disproportionately high, and successful births have become rare enough that each one is a small event and each loss is a large one. J35, on the pod records maintained by the Center for Whale Research, has now had four documented pregnancies and only one surviving offspring. Of the two that died as newborns, she carried both.
What the coverage keeps circling around, without quite ever settling on, is that whatever Tahlequah is doing in the water when she pushes a dead calf to the surface, she’s doing it in front of an audience that recognises something in it. Grief may or may not be the technically correct scientific vocabulary. It is, on the accumulated observation of anyone who has watched her do it, the closest word most languages have to describe what the behaviour looks like, and possibly the closest word for what the behaviour actually is.
Kiran Athar writes about biology, animal behaviour, and the ordinary corners of the natural world where the two intersect. This piece draws on institutional reporting from NOAA Fisheries and analysis published by the SeaDoc Society, alongside primary observations by the Center for Whale Research.
