Heartbreaking photos show orca carrying her dead calf, just as she did for weeks in 2018

An orca who made international headlines in 2018 when she carried her dead calf with her for more than two weeks has now been photographed carrying another dead calf.

J35, known by the nickname Talequah, is a member of the southern resident killer whale J pod and gave birth recently to a female calf.

However, that calf is now deceased, and Talequah has been seen in Puget Sound, Washington state, carrying it with her.

“It’s that much harder to see now that she has lost another one,” Michael Milstein, a public affairs officer for West Coast Regional Office for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

“The better news to remember is that J35 has given birth to calves that have survived and (that) gives us hope for the population.”

While J35 carried her calf more than 1,500 km in 2018, it is not known how long she may carry this calf.

Brad Hanson, who leads the Southern Resident Research Team at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, was one of the team members who monitors the whales on the water.

He said they were alerted to a new calf in J pod on Dec. 20, 2024 and they were able to get out on the water on Dec. 23.

They saw the new calf, a female, but he said they were concerned about her health due to some strange behaviour.

“At that point, we did see J35 without the calf, and we thought that she appeared to be pushing something around, but we couldn’t get a good look,” Hanson said.

“So yesterday we went out again on the 1st of January and we were able to confirm that J35, in fact, had lost the calf. And she was pushing it around on her head, much like what was happening in 2018.”

Hanson said the team did not spend too long with the whales, keeping their distance and making sure to give them space.

He said other southern resident whales have been seen carrying their dead calves but none as long as J35 did in 2018.

“The way she’s pushing the calf around is essentially… from what we can see from the surface, it’s typically draped across her snout or up on top of her head,” Hanson said.

“And that essentially results in a lot more drag. And so her energy expenditure is going to be fairly significant potentially for doing that. And then … the calf doesn’t appear to float and so it looks like she’ll do a harried dive to go down and recover the calf. And whether or not she’s pushing it at that point or, you know, grabbing it, we’re not real sure.”

Joe Gaydos, the science director for the SeaDoc Society, said J35 is grieving or mourning the loss of her baby.

“We do see this behaviour in other animals, generally only long-live socially cohesive animals, primates, dolphins, things like that,” Gaydos said.

“So, yes, I think it’s fair to say from a scientific perspective, if they have the same hardwiring, they’re going to have the same emotions (as humans).”

Dr. Michael Weiss. research director at the Center for Whale Research in Washington State, said J pod did not have any new calves in 2023.

He said J60 was born in late December 2022, but was then confirmed to be missing in early January. In 2022, J37 did give birth to a female who is still around and doing well.

“There were other calves born in the population as a whole in 2023, so L pod produced two new calves in 23, both of which are still around,” Weiss added.

The whales face several threats, including ship strikes, noise pollution, food sources, and inbreeding.

“These whales are facing a lot of different threats from contaminants, from inbreeding… when we run a population viability analysis of the population, where we project forward in time under various scenarios, there’s a whole bunch of scenarios that don’t result in recovery of the population, and there’s very few that do result in recovery,” Weiss said.

He added that the key component of the whales’ survival is they have to boost their food availability.

Southern resident killer whales remain critically endangered, and scientists believe a lack of Chinook salmon is their biggest threat.

Meanwhile, there is some good news.

On Dec. 30, the Center for Whale Research received reports that a new calf may be travelling with the J19s and J16s matrilines.

On Dec. 31, three staff members were able to get on the water with J pod and confirmed a new calf, designated J62.