The Beluga Whale: The Eerie "Human" Body of the Ocean's Most Uncanny Whale—and That's Just for Starters! (9 Photos)

The beluga whale boasts some genuinely bizarre body proportions. From certain angles, it looks like a sleek, elegant white whale. From others, a jacked alien bodybuilder. From others still, a graceful, otherworldly woman with strikingly distinct knees—despite the fact that belugas don't actually have legs. It's a whale, after all; it has a tail! Let's take a closer look at this creature from every angle.





A whale.



A bodybuilder.





A mermaid!

Let me start with the neck. In most whales and dolphins, the cervical vertebrae are fused into a single solid block of bone—a solid design for keeping the head stable at high speeds when hitting a wall of water. A dolphin's head flows straight from its body like a spearhead on a shaft. Turning just its head isn't an option; if a dolphin wants to look around, it has to pivot its entire body. Belugas, however, don't have fused neck vertebrae. They can nod, shake their heads, and turn to look right at you. And honestly, it's a little creeping!



Oh, hey there! Just visiting from Sirius for a couple million years. Don't be alarmed.

They pay for this flexibility with speed. Belugas are slow swimmers, cruising at a sluggish two to five miles per hour (three to nine km/h), making outrunning an orca a lost cause. But belugas never intended to run away. Instead, they ventured so far north into the Arctic that even omnipresent killer whales threw up their flippers and gave up on these lunatics. The second mind-bending feature is the forehead. All toothed whales have a melon—a fatty acoustic organ on their forehead that acts as a lens to project echolocation signals. It's an acoustic spotlight, and in most species, it's fairly static. But belugas can actively manipulate their melon. By contracting facial muscles, they can squash it, stretch it forward, flatten it out, or ripple movement across it. Combined with flexible lips, this gives the beluga uncanny facial expressions: it can purse its lips, "smile," look surprised, and pull goofy faces.



Brain shield: protecting against silly thoughts.

Of course, these aren't actual emotional expressions—it's acoustic tuning. It's a living, variable-focus lens adjusted for specific tasks: a wide-angle fan beam when navigating under sea ice searching for air holes, or a narrow, deep-penetrating beam when probing muddy seabeds for hidden fish. Still, seeing a whale pull faces is deeply unsettling. Now, onto the knees! Those viral photos showing a beluga standing vertically in the water with what look like two distinctly bent knees aren't Photoshopped. That really is its body. Except... those aren't legs.

Memes like this have been floating around the internet for years.

Belugas are Arctic animals, shielded from frigid waters by a blubber layer up to six inches (15 cm) thick, accounting for nearly half their total body weight. This blubber isn't spread evenly: toward the rear, where the body tapers into the tail stock, it settles into thick folds. When a beluga hangs vertically and tucks its tail inward, those folds bunch up, casting a silhouette that looks remarkably like human legs with kneecaps. That's the whole secret! So we have a whale that accidentally mimics a human posture. It's no surprise that in Northern folklore, belugas frequently inspired tales of drowned souls, enchanted maidens, or merfolk. And the quirks don't end there. Belugas lack a dorsal fin; instead, a low, rigid ridge lined with small bumps runs down their back. In fact, their scientific name, Delphinapterus leucas, translates to "white wingless dolphin." The evolutionary reason is brutally practical. A dorsal fin is a rigid appendage that can't be retracted. In a world covered by ice, it's a liability: belugas surface to breathe through narrow cracks and leads, often punching through thin ice with their backs, which would snap a dorsal fin right off. On top of that, any protruding limb acts as a radiator, shedding precious body heat. Arctic evolution scrapped the fin and kept the calloused ridge, which works perfectly for bashing through ice from below.



One more photo, puny humans, and I'll shatter this aquarium with my monstrous back!

Then there's the voice! Belugas are highly social, pod-dwelling animals whose social structures mirror human communities in surprising ways. Their populations generally split into nursery pods—where females and calves lead a settled lifestyle—and bachelor pods of males constantly competing for breeding rights. To support such active social lives, they evolved extraordinary vocal talents, earning them the nickname "canaries of the sea." They whistle, chirp, bleat, roar, and even produce sounds beyond human hearing. These vocalizations are produced by specialized tissue structures in their nasal passages called "phonic lips," which vibrate as air passes over them. They also possess three pairs of ring-shaped air sacs beneath their skin. Scientists believe these sacs act as acoustic resonators, giving belugas their unbelievably rich vocal range.



And so we've reached the bottom of this "iceberg."

All in all, the beluga completely shatters our expectations with its bizarre toolkit. In short, while scientists haven't found real mermaids yet, it turns out all you need for a convincing cosplay is pale skin, something vaguely resembling knees, and an enchanting voice. Voila—combine those traits, wrap them in a blanket of sea mist, and you'll drive any weary sailor out of his mind. All it takes is an ethereal song across the water and a silhouette that vaguely looks like a woman.



Or a distinguished gentleman who definitely has a big black SUV parked somewhere on the ocean floor.