Watch Unprecedented Footage of Sperm Whales Helping a Newborn Calf Take Its First Breaths
Unrelated animals worked with the mother and her relatives, marking the first known evidence of whales from multiple families assisting in a birth
Sara Hashemi - Daily Correspondent
March 31, 2026
The sperm whales gathered around the mother before the delivery. Y. Aluma et al., Scientific Reports, 2026 under CC-BY-4.0
In July 2023, a team of researchers tracking whales off the Caribbean island of Dominica noticed something strange. A group of 11 sperm whales—which would normally be spaced out to forage—had gathered in a tight cluster near the water’s surface.
“That’s not the kind of behavior you normally see,” whale biologist Shane Gero, who was on the boat, tells Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Scientific American. The massive marine animals all seemed focused on one individual, a female named Rounder. Then, the researchers saw a gush of blood.
At first, they thought one of the animals had been attacked, perhaps by pilot whales the scientists had seen earlier in the day. But then Rounder pushed out a tiny tail, and the team realized they were witnessing something extraordinary: a birth.
“All the biologists on the boat were losing their minds,” Gero, of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit aiming to understand whale communication, says to Camille Bromley at National Geographic.
Gero and his colleagues captured the full birth on video with two drones. The footage shows the other sperm whales in the group—most of them female, many unrelated to the mother—teaming up to help deliver the calf and support it during its first few hours. The work, described in a study published March 26 in the journal Science, shows a type of cooperation that has never been documented in species beyond primates.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-unprecedented-footage-of-sperm-whales-helping-a-newborn-calf-take-its-first-breaths-180988450/
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