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.”

The scientists had taken to the water on February 28 to count right whales and visually assess their size and overall health. In spring, the whales migrate northward from warm Caribbean waters where they give birth