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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

For today’s deeper dive section, we look at how a Canadian whale scientist found love and hope – and a lesson for humanity – among the most mysterious creatures on the planet.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

1. Emissions: Ottawa and Alberta agree on methane-emissions reduction plan
2. Oil and gas: LNG Canada to take lead role on potential Coastal GasLink expansion
3. Electric vehicles: Battle over Ottawa’s new vehicle regulations heats up
4. Human rights: UN committee criticizes Canada for not filling corporate human rights abuses watchdog role
5. Fire: First Nations group in Northern Ontario demands better fire service after child’s death
6. Fisheries: Split quota continues between Indigenous, commercial harvesters for contentious baby eel fishery

A miracle at sea

For this week’s deeper dive, a glimpse into the unique nature of whales, based on the feature written by Erin Anderssen.

The first peer-reviewed papers about the birth of a sperm whale were published last week in the journals Science and Scientific Reports, providing evidence, the authors say, of sperm whales, both related and not, attending to the mother and baby, much like how humans come together for childbirth.

Shane Gero’s biology team was on the water that day with Harvard robotics engineers and MIT computer scientists, all members of Project CETI, a non-profit interdisciplinary research group trying to decipher sperm whale communication.

Our happiness reporter, Erin Anderssen, wrote about the paper and Dr. Gero’s findings.

As captured on drone video, the baby slides into the sea, a delicate, glistening bean already weighing 1,000 kilograms and stretching roughly four metres. It’s limp in the water, too weak to swim. And its tail is too soft and droopy to assist.

But family help arrives. In groups of three and four, aunts and cousins cluster around, squeezing the newborn between their bodies, lifting it out of the water, touching it with their heads. Their actions support the slippery baby at the surface as it gains strength. It looks a lot like the scene in a hospital maternity room when everyone wants to hold the new arrival.

Dr. Gero has travelled with the whales, and calls them by name. For two decades, the whales have been telling him a deep and complex tale of love and community.

Project CETI’s annual budget is in the millions; studying whales is complicated and expensive. Finding them requires patience. But over many decades of increasingly high-tech and ever-patient whale-watching, we have acquired a limited view into their lives.

Over the years, Dr. Gero has seen more babies vanish than he can count. In 2016, he co-authored a paper estimating that one in three whale calves didn’t make it to their first birthday. After that, the scientists stopped naming newborns in their first years of life.

Young whales die from natural causes, but also human hazards such as pollution and fishing-line entanglement. Scientists believe that the sperm whale’s communal society evolved to protect their offspring in their early, vulnerable years.

They can recognize a fellow clanmate by their clan codas, the clicking pattern whales use to communicate – similar to how a Canadian in a foreign country may recognize another Canadian. This requires higher-level cognition and an awareness of cultural membership.

And what appears to matter to sperm whales, he says, is connection and community. If whales were human, we’d call that love.

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