If you are visiting Belize, and in particular if you are going scuba diving in Belize, you might be asking are there whales in Belize?
There are whales in Belize in the Caribbean, which include pilot whales, false killer whales, dolphins, sperm whales, orcas or killer whales and very rare sightings of humpback whales. But there are also whale sharks, which are not whales, even though their name includes ‘whale‘.
The best way to dive Belize is by a scuba diving liveaboard. You can check the latest and best deals on Belize liveaboards using the following window:
The following article includes at least one video of each of the whales encountered in Belize, as per the following list of whales:
Pilot whales.
False killer whales.
The types of dolphins.
Sperm whales.
Orcas or killer whales (rare sightings).
Humpback whales (very rare sightings).
Either before or after reading about whales in Belize, you might like to take a look at Belize liveaboards in the following table:
This list of Belize liveaboards is in descending customer rating order, followed by Scuba Diving Luxury Rating (SDE Lux Rating, see below), so the liveaboards with the highest customer rating and the best SDE lux rating will be at the top of the list. If you want to change the list order, use the “Sort by” dropdown below.
The Scuba Diving Earth Luxury Rating (SDE Lux Rating) is explained on each liveaboard review when you click the “Discover Liveaboard” link, and is my own Liveaboard Luxury Rating I’ve assigned to all liveaboards. Choosing between liveaboards is helped by customer scores, and if you get stuck choosing between two or three liveaboards, where each one has a high customer score out of 10, you can use the SDE Luxury Rating to help narrow down your choice.
Think about it like using Booking.com when searching for the best hotel. Booking.com also use a customer score where each customer rates hotels out of 10. This is similar to the liveaboard customer rating, which is also rated out of 10. But let’s say you only like to stay in hotels rated 8 and above on Booking.com, but you also want the hotel to have WIFI or parking, or to have a swimming pool etc. The features each hotel has is usually secondary to the score out of 10.
One of the smaller whales you’ll find in Belize are pilot whales. There are two species of pilot whale that exist and it is the short-finned pilot whale that is found in Belize.
Pilot whales get their name from a theory in the past that the pod was ‘piloted‘ by a single leader, but this is known not to be true now. Pilot whales are actually large dolphins and they are the second largest member of the oceanic dolphin family.
One of the later whales spotted in Belize is the sperm whale. The following video is of a pserm whale in Belize, which is not great footage, but shows there are sometimes seen off the coast of Belize.
One of the most common sightings of any whale in Belize would be dolphins. In Belize you are likely to see Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, which are found in the open ocean and around the inshore coastal lagoons. The other types of dolphin encountered in Belize are the spinner dolphin and the Atlantic spotted dolphin.
Atlantic Spotted and Bottlenose Dolphins – Belize – April 6, 2021
Humpback whales in Belize
Whilst extremely rare to see humpback whales in Belize, the video below shows that they do occasionally visit Belizean waters. It is a shame that the following humpback whale died in the end, which is extremely sad.
A Humpback Whale Dies After Being Trapped in Gill Net – Belize
The whale that’s not a whale in Belize – the whale shark
When you look for if there are whales in Belize, the whale shark pops up in the search results. But of course a whale shark is actually not a whale, it’s a fish, but a very large fish…hence its name.
The following video is of a whale shark encounter in Belize.
I hope you enjoyed this article about are there whales in Belize
I’d love to hear from you. Tell us about your adventures of diving and snorkelling. Please use the comments section below. Please also share your photos. Either from your underwater cameras or videos from your waterproof go-pro’s!
If this article hasn’t answered all of your questions. If you have more questions either about snorkelling or scuba diving (or specifically about are there whales in Belize), please comment below with your questions.
There will also be many more articles about scuba and scuba diving safety tips (and on snorkelling too) for you to read and learn about this fabulous sport.
Have fun and be safe!
Are There Whales In Belize?
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Article written by Russell Bowyer who has been a scuba diver since diving on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 1989. After his first dive he trained as a BSAC diver in the UK. He attained his Diver Leader certification with BSAC. He then went on to become a scuba diving instructor, teaching others how to dive and was voted as Diving Officer and Treasurer for the Saffron Walden BSAC club too. Russell has dived all over the world, including the UK, on liveaboards in the Red Sea, the Caribbean, South Africa and the USA. Russell is experienced in all dive types, including drift diving, deep dives that involved decompression stops and recreational dives too.
