With 331 belugas left, the Park Service is chartering a boat to learn what they eat

Only 331 Cook Inlet beluga whales remain, and the population isn't bouncing back. Now the National Park Service wants to spend up to three winters figuring out what the endangered whales are living on — starting with a boat.

The agency is seeking a charter vessel to carry scientists into western lower Cook Inlet during the dead of winter, a season when the belugas and sea ducks forage there and researchers rarely get to look. The study is a "prey-landscape assessment": mapping what food is where, on the theory that you can't protect a foraging ground you don't understand. The first cruise is planned for November 2026.

Whether that's enough is contested. Conservation groups including the Center for Biological Diversity argue that surveying and monitoring alone won't recover the belugas — that the science needs to come paired with stronger protections, not in place of them. The Marine Mammal Commission still counts just 331 of the whales.

The work is also a paycheck for someone's boat. The charter is set aside for small businesses and could run three years — 15 to 18 survey days a year across November, January and March, with trips out of Homer. It needs a vessel of at least 65 feet, room for 10 scientists, and a captain with at least three years in Cook Inlet and along the Alaska Peninsula.