A small whale with long flippers, found in temperate and colder seas.
It has a sturdy dark body, a bulging forehead and long flippers that curve backward.
Three long-finned pilot whales tagged with satellite-linked dive recorders around the Faroe Islands spent more time near the surface beyond the continental shelf than over it. Heide-Jørgensen et al. found this pattern in all three animals. They averaged about 60% of time above 7 m; the deepest dive was 828 m.
Dive rates varied: one female averaged about 23 per hour, versus roughly 7–9 for the two males. Shelf position and individual differences add context that a maximum depth alone misses. The whales were tagged in 2000, so the results describe three animals in that region and period. Other populations and seasons need their own observations.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment
The 2018 global IUCN assessment lists the Long-finned Pilot Whale as Least Concern (LC), assessed on 18 June 2018, with global population trend Unknown. A separate 2021 assessment of the Inner Mediterranean subpopulation lists it as Endangered (EN) with a decreasing trend. These entries describe different geographic units: the global species and one regional subpopulation.