A slender dolphin with a long thin beak, named for the spinning leaps it makes clear of the water.
To about 2.1 m and 59 to 77 kg, the smallest dolphin on this site. The beak is extremely long and thin. Red Sea animals have the three-part pattern — dark grey back, light grey flanks, white belly — with dark lips and beak tip.
Revillagigedo animals are a different subspecies and look different. They are drab and nearly uniform dark grey, they lose the three-part pattern, and adult males develop a forward-leaning dorsal fin and a pronounced bulge under the tail. A diver who has seen spinners in both places is looking at visibly different animals.
The spinning is the identification. It leaves the water and turns on its own long axis up to four times in a single leap, and occasionally seven. No other dolphin does this. The pantropical spotted dolphin, which it schools with, leaps but does not spin.
It feeds at night at 200 to 300 m and rests by day in shallow sheltered water. In the Red Sea this matters. At Samadai and Sataya the dolphins come into the lagoon at dawn after a night offshore and spend the day in slow synchronised circuits in a few metres of water. Samadai was closed entirely in 2003 after daily visitor numbers reached 500 to 800 and has been managed since 2004 under a three-zone system: one zone is closed to people altogether, one is snorkelling only with a guide, and boats and scuba stay outside both. Scuba diving is not permitted in the resting zones. Swim parallel to the animals, never towards them. The fine for breaching the code is about 560 US dollars.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.