"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."
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.
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.
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