Two whales 'hug' in newly recorded rare footage

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They were swimming along together as one, two male North Atlantic right whales, each draping a fin over the other’s body.

It looked as if they were hugging.

“Are they showing affection? Are they showing love?” mused Michael Moore, a right whale expert at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. He was on a small boat in Cape Cod Bay with a colleague, Amy Knowlton, and photographer Brian Skerry and his assistant. “We agreed ‘affection’ was a word we might hypothesize.”

Moore says this was the first time he’d observed right whales swimming like that—a posture scientists refer to as belly-to-belly behavior. He says the video footage of the two males, recorded by a drone Skerry, a National Geographic Explorer, had launched, offers the clearest view of the phenomenon ever seen.

Studies suggest that whales form groups for play, to maintain social bonds, to mate, or to prepare for mating. What surprised most was “the gentleness of the whole thing. It was like a slow waltz,” he says. 

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/rare-footage-shows-endangered-whales-hugging/ar-BB1gth7S?li=BBnbcA1

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