Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas): Facts and Habitat

What does a beluga whale look like?

A beluga has a stocky, rounded body that tapers to a small head and a wide tail fluke. The front of the head carries a large, soft bulge called the melon, a fatty organ that focuses the clicks the whale uses for echolocation. Belugas can change the shape of the melon as they make sounds, which gives them a surprisingly expressive face.

Instead of a dorsal fin, the beluga has a low, tough ridge along its back, an advantage for a whale that swims under and between sea ice. Its flippers are short, broad and paddle-like. The mouth holds about 32–40 small, peg-shaped teeth, used for gripping prey rather than chewing.

Unlike most whales, the beluga has neck vertebrae that are not fused together. It can nod and turn its head from side to side, which helps it scan the seabed for food and look around in murky water.

Adults are white or creamy white, but calves are born gray. They darken to a blue-gray and then slowly lose their pigment, usually turning fully white at around 7–9 years old. You can read more in why are belugas white? The beluga’s only close living relative is the narwhal; together they make up the family Monodontidae.

How big is a beluga whale?

Belugas are mid-sized whales: larger than a bottlenose dolphin but far smaller than an orca. Males are about a quarter longer than females and much heavier.

Both sexes reach full size by about 10 years old. A thick layer of blubber, which NOAA Fisheries says can make up about 40 percent of body weight, keeps belugas warm in water close to freezing and stores energy for lean months.

Where do beluga whales live?

Belugas live right around the Arctic, in the cold seas off Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Svalbard and Russia. Their range is patchy rather than continuous, and scientists recognize about 20 separate populations, or stocks, each with its own summer and winter grounds.

In summer, many belugas move into shallow bays and river estuaries, such as the Churchill and Nelson rivers on Hudson Bay, the Mackenzie River delta in Canada and the river mouths of the White Sea in Russia. In autumn they head offshore to spend the winter along the edge of the pack ice or in polynyas, areas of open water that stay ice-free. Some populations migrate thousands of kilometers each year, while others stay in one area all year.

Two southern populations live well outside the Arctic: one in the St. Lawrence River estuary in Quebec, Canada, and one in Cook Inlet near Anchorage, Alaska. Lone belugas sometimes wander much farther south, turning up in the Thames, the Seine and other European rivers. For the full picture, see where do beluga whales live?

What do beluga whales eat?

Belugas are opportunistic hunters that eat whatever is common where they are. Their diet includes many kinds of fish, such as Arctic cod, salmon, capelin, herring, smelt, eulachon, flatfish and sculpins, along with shrimp, squid, octopus, crabs, clams and marine worms.

Because their teeth are small, belugas use suction to pull prey into the mouth and swallow it whole. Their flexible necks let them search the seabed, and some have been seen blowing jets of water to uncover animals hidden in the mud. In some areas, small groups work together to herd schools of fish into shallow water.

Feeding follows the seasons. In Alaska’s Cook Inlet and Bristol Bay, belugas time their summer feeding to the runs of salmon and eulachon entering the rivers. Most feeding happens fairly close to the surface or on shallow seabeds, but NOAA Fisheries notes that belugas can dive to about 1,000 m (3,300 ft) and stay down for up to 25 minutes.

Behavior and communication

Belugas are highly social. They usually travel in pods of 2–25 animals, often around 10, but individuals move freely between groups. Mothers and calves often form nursery groups, while adult males may travel together. In summer, pods merge into gatherings of hundreds or thousands in favorite estuaries.

They are slow swimmers, cruising at about 3–9 km/h (2–6 mph) with short bursts up to about 22 km/h (14 mph). Unlike most whales, they can swim backward, and they rarely leap clear of the water. Wild belugas are often curious about boats and play with objects such as seaweed, sticks and bubbles.

Belugas are among the noisiest whales. They whistle, chirp, squeal, click and buzz, which earned them the nickname “canaries of the sea”, explained in why are belugas called sea canaries? Their echolocation helps them hunt in dark or muddy water and find breathing holes and cracks in the ice.

Reproduction and life cycle

Most mating takes place in late winter and spring. Pregnancy lasts about 14–15 months, and a single calf is born in spring or summer, often in warmer bays and estuaries. Newborns are gray, about 1.5 m (5 ft) long and able to swim beside their mother at once.

Calves nurse for about two years, although they start catching shrimp and small fish once their teeth appear at about one year old. Females usually have their first calf at about 8–9 years old and then give birth roughly every 2–3 years. Other adults, sometimes called “aunts”, may help look after young calves. Studies of ovaries suggest that some older females stop breeding, which makes the beluga one of the few mammals besides humans and some other toothed whales known to go through menopause.

How long do beluga whales live?

Belugas are long-lived. Scientists estimate their age by counting growth layers in the teeth, much like the rings of a tree. For years it was assumed that two layers formed each year, but a 2006 study using radiocarbon from nuclear bomb tests showed that only one layer forms per year, which roughly doubled earlier age estimates.

Many wild belugas now appear to live several decades. NOAA Fisheries reports that the oldest beluga on record had 80 growth layers, and its age may have been underestimated because the teeth wear down, so some belugas probably reach 80 years or more.

Predators and threats

Belugas have two main natural predators. Orcas hunt them in open water, and polar bears catch them at breathing holes, especially when groups become trapped in shrinking pools of open water as the ice freezes over. Belugas often retreat into shallow water or close to ice when orcas are near.

People are the bigger influence. Commercial whaling in the 18th to 20th centuries greatly reduced several populations, including those in the St. Lawrence and Cook Inlet. Today some Indigenous communities in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia still take belugas for food under local management rules.

Modern threats include pollution, underwater noise from ships, oil and gas development and climate change. St. Lawrence belugas carry high levels of industrial chemicals such as PCBs, and about a quarter of the dead adults examined there between 1983 and 1999 had cancer. As sea ice shrinks, more orcas and more ships are reaching beluga waters.

Conservation status

The IUCN Red List classifies the beluga as Least Concern (assessed in 2017). The species was listed as Vulnerable until 2008 and Near Threatened from 2008 to 2017; better surveys showed that the largest populations are big and stable. Worldwide there are thought to be roughly 200,000 belugas.

Some populations are in serious trouble, however. Cook Inlet belugas fell from about 1,300 in 1979 to an estimated 279 in 2018 and are listed as Endangered under the US Endangered Species Act; NOAA’s latest best estimate of about 331 whales suggests they may be stabilizing. The St. Lawrence Estuary population, reduced by hunting to roughly a thousand or fewer by the 1980s, is listed as Endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, and the belugas of eastern Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay have also been assessed as Endangered by Canada’s wildlife status committee, COSEWIC.

Belugas and people

For Inuit and other Arctic peoples, belugas have been an important source of food and materials for centuries, and muktuk, the skin with its layer of blubber, is a traditional food. Today, beluga watching brings visitors to Churchill in Manitoba and Tadoussac in Quebec every summer.

Belugas were among the first whales kept in captivity, starting in 1861 in New York. In 2019 Canada passed a law banning the capture and breeding of whales and dolphins for captivity. A male beluga named NOC, held by the US Navy, became famous for imitating human speech in the 1980s.

Belugas even appear in the fossil record of New England. A beluga skeleton dug up near Charlotte, Vermont, in 1849, left by an arm of the sea that flooded the area at the end of the last ice age, is now Vermont’s official state fossil.

Myths and facts

Myth: belugas are born white. Calves are gray at birth and take years to turn white.

Myth: beluga caviar comes from beluga whales. It comes from the beluga sturgeon, a large fish of the Caspian and Black seas. The two animals simply share a name taken from the Russian word for white.

Myth: belugas are always smiling. The upturned mouth is simply the shape of the beluga’s jaw and lips, not a sign of mood.

Fact: belugas are found far from home. Lost belugas have reached rivers deep inside Europe, including the Rhine in Germany, where one swam as far as Bonn in 1966, a reminder of how far these curious whales can roam. To meet other ice-loving animals, see our list of Arctic animals.