Records concentrate around Bristol Bay, with more scattered reports from the North Slope and even inland toward the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. Alaska holds this whale’s entire US range, stretching from river mouths and estuaries out to the edge of the pack ice.
Belugas gather by the hundreds in warm river mouths and estuaries each summer to molt, rubbing their skin against gravel and sandy river bottoms to shed a winter’s worth of skin. Their neck vertebrae never fuse the way most whales’ do, letting a beluga turn its head side to side, and their varied diet of fish and squid lets them exploit whatever’s locally abundant.
Records rise through summer with peaks in April and again from July through September, tracking those estuary gatherings rather than a real change in how many belugas are in Alaska waters. One Alaska population, the small, geographically isolated group in Cook Inlet, is tracked and listed as endangered separately from belugas everywhere else, a reminder that a healthy statewide picture can still mask real trouble in one corner of the range.
Full species profile
