Polar bears are at risk as sea ice melts
Polar bears may disappear due to climate change, study warns 01:59
Authorities have identified a woman and her 1-year-old son who were killed by a polar bear in a remote village in western Alaska.
Summer Miomik, 24, of St. Michael, Alaska, and her 1-year-old son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, were attacked and killed by a polar bear near a school in Wells, on the western tip of the Seward Peninsula, Alaska State Police said Tuesday.
“Initial reports indicate a polar bear entered the community and chased multiple residents,” troopers wrote. “The bear fatally attacked an adult female and a young male.
The bear was shot and killed by a local resident while attacking the couple, police said.
An Alaska State Trooper and an official from the state Department of Fish and Game traveled to Wells to investigate the attack, Austin McDaniel, a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers, said in a statement to CBS News Wednesday night.
Investigators learned the mother and son were walking between the school and the clinic when the attack occurred, McDaniel said.
Their remains have been taken to the state medical examiner’s office for an autopsy, McDaniel added.
Wells is a small, mostly Inupiaq town of about 150 people, just over 100 miles northwest of Nome.
Fatal polar bear attacks are rare in recent Alaskan history. In 1990, a polar bear killed a man in the north of Wales in the village of Point Lay. Biologists later said the animal was showing signs of starvation, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Alaskan scientists from the US Geological Survey found in 2019 that changes in sea ice habitat coincided with evidence that land use by polar bears was increasing and that the chances of encountering a polar bear had increased.
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