Belugas Can Recognize Themselves in a Mirror. So Can I.
I drew 100 belugas and then found out belugas are smarter about mirrors than I am at 3am. π
This one's part science, part me being emotional about a whale. Bear with me.
The study (real, not cope)
On May 20, 2026, a paper came out in PLOS One called "Evidence for mirror self-recognition in beluga whales". The lead author is Alexander Mildener, and the senior scientist is Diana Reiss of Hunter College, CUNY, the same researcher who co-authored the first study showing mirror self-recognition in bottlenose dolphins back in 2001.
National Geographic covered it (story by Cara Giaimo), and honestly the details are the best part.
The team worked with four belugas at the New York Aquarium of the Wildlife Conservation Society: Kathy, Marina, Natasha, and Natasha's daughter Maris, who was 7 at the time. They put a mirror on a window of the pool and filmed what happened. As a control, they also filmed the whales with plain see-through plexiglass in the same spot.
Two of the four mostly ignored it. But Natasha and Maris got curious.
- First they clapped their jaws at the reflection, which belugas do to look tough at other belugas. (Relatable. I also trash-talk my own reflection.)
- Then they started testing it. Natasha nodded her head. Maris waggled hers up, down, side to side. Basically "wait⦠is that me?"
- Then the self-checks. They watched themselves do barrel rolls. They looked inside their own mouths. Maris reared up and flapped her pectoral fins at the mirror in a move the researchers literally named the "pec shimmy." π
- They blew bubbles, from their mouths and blowholes, and then bit the bubbles. Mildener told Nat Geo those "aren't really behaviors you see when a mirror is not present."
Then came the hard part, the mark test. Trainers put a temporary, non-toxic mark on a spot the whale can't see without a mirror. Maris didn't pass hers. But Natasha did: she kept turning her marked side toward the mirror, sometimes pressing it right up against the glass, to check it out. Per ScienceAlert's coverage, the mark she passed on was behind her right ear.
That puts belugas in a very small club. Great apes (chimps, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas), bottlenose dolphins, Asian elephants, magpies, and a little fish called the cleaner wrasse. And now belugas. π
The plot twist that got me
The footage was filmed in 2001. Life got busy, and the tapes basically sat there for almost twenty years.
Then in 2020 a student named Alexander Mildener showed up at Hunter. As a kid, he'd grown up visiting those exact belugas at the New York Aquarium. Reiss dug up the old tapes, he digitized and analyzed them during lockdown, and that became the paper. (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College have write-ups too.)
So: work that sat in a drawer for two decades, picked up by someone who loved these whales since he was little, and finished anyway.
If that isn't "still building," I don't know what is. π
Now the manifesting part
In November 2025 my wallet said .012 SOL. Not 12. Point-zero-one-two. I'd just been rugged in the trenches.
When you get rugged, the mirror gets weird. You look at yourself and you see the guy who got cooked. The guy who aped. The guy with 110 followers posting into the void.
I'm not a guru. My version of manifesting isn't candles and a vision board. It's opening the laptop again. It's drawing one more beluga. It's saying out loud what I'm going to do before anybody believes it, and then doing the boring part every day until it's true.
A mirror test is about one thing: can you figure out that the thing in the glass is you? Not some rival. Not the market. You.
That's the whole game in the trenches, for real. The chart isn't you. The rug isn't you. The wallet balance definitely isn't you. π What's left after all of that, the one who keeps showing up, that's the reflection that counts.
#013 looked in the mirror and saw a champion
That's why I made this piece.
#013, The Condado Bad Boy, is my own beluga. Red gloves, gold chain, shades, Condado Beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the cartoon edition he's standing in a little beachfront boxing gym, gloves up, in front of a big gold mirror.
And the reflection isn't just him. It's him with the belt. Confetti. "CHAMPION." The #13 on the trunks.
He's not there yet. That's the point. He looks in the mirror and sees who he's going to be, and he trains like it's already true. Manifesting destiny, victory, success. Talking trash to the waves. The sign on the wall says Champion mind. Heart. Fins.
Natasha checked her mark. #013 checks his belt. π
I'm not saying belugas manifest. Please don't cite me in a journal. But I am saying that when real scientists showed that belugas can look in a mirror and know it's them, I felt that in my chest. Because that's exactly what the last year has been for me: learning to look at the guy who got rugged and recognize the guy who's still building.
Same pod, different reflections
Big Belugas is 100 one-of-ones, #000 to #099, at BigBelugas.com. A mix of generative neon line art and a cute cartoon edition. Every one has its own name and story.
#013 isn't for sale. He stays in my corner as the reminder that I didn't quit.
The rest of the pod is looking for homes:
- Chain: [CHAIN] (reveal soon π)
- Mint: [DATE]
- Price: [PRICE]
- Invites: DM me at @NftRaffi. Tell me which beluga you'd want and why.
One official link only: bigbelugas.com. I'll never DM you first and I'll never ask for your seed phrase.
Go look in a mirror today. Do a pec shimmy if you have to. π
Still building. ππ€
Raffi
Sources: Mildener, Reiss et al., "Evidence for mirror self-recognition in beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas)," PLOS One, May 20, 2026; Cara Giaimo, "Belugas join a rare animal kingdom clubβthey can recognize themselves in a mirror," National Geographic, May 20, 2026; CUNY Graduate Center; Hunter College; ScienceAlert.
Want in? DM @NftRaffi on X for an invite, then go meet the pod.