Authorities in the United States on Wednesday identified a 24-year-old woman and her one-year-old son as the victims of a fatal polar bear attack in an isolated Native Alaskan village.
The fatal rupture occurred Tuesday in Wales, a coastal community no stranger to coexistence with polar bears, located along the Bering Strait at the westernmost tip of the North American mainland — about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Russia.
Summer Miomik of St. Michael and her son, Clyde Ongtowasruk, were killed in the attack, Alaska State Police said in a statement.
The polar bear chased several residents before another community member shot and killed it, authorities said. The attack happened near a school in Wales.
Bad weather and a lack of runway lights at Wells’ gravel runway prevented Alaska state officials and Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials from arriving in Wells on Tuesday after the attack. Attempts were made again on Wednesday.
Some villages in Alaska form patrols during periods when polar bears are more likely to be on the move [Getty Images]
When asked to describe the mood in Wells on Wednesday, Dawn Hendrickson, the school’s principal, called it “traumatic.”
Classes were canceled after the fatal attack. “The students are with their families,” Hendrickson said. Counselors were made available to students.
Like many remote villages in Alaska, the mostly Inupiaq community of about 150 people organizes patrols when bears are expected in town, from July to early November, before the sea ice forms and the bears head out onto the frozen landscape to hunt seals.
That makes what happened this week almost unheard of because polar bears are usually far out on the ice in the dead of winter and not near villages, said Jeff York, senior director of conservation at Polar Bear International, a talk group. The last fatal polar bear encounter in Alaska was in 1990.
“I would walk around the community of Wells probably without any [bear] deterrents because historically it’s a safe time of year,” said York, who has decades of experience studying polar bears. “You don’t expect to run into bears because they would be hunting seals in the sea ice and going about their business.”
It’s unclear whether this attack is related to climate change, York said, but it’s consistent with what’s expected, as the Arctic continues to warm four times faster than the rest of Earth, altering the ecosystem in ways not yet known. are fully understood.
This particular bear, however, is a member of a population that is doing quite well, said Andrew Desrocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta and an expert on polar bears.
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.
“We expect and happen to witness an increase in human-polar bear encounters. Fortunately, most of these do not result in injury or death, but the likelihood of that happening seems to be increasing,” York said.
Wells is just over 161 km (100 mi) northwest of Nome. The community is accessible by plane and boat, including barges that deliver household goods. Winter trails provide snowmobile access to other communities and livelihoods. All-terrain vehicles or ATVs are used for non-winter hunting and fishing.
Polar bears are at the top of the food chain and see humans as a food source, York said.
A report he co-authored, titled “Understanding Polar Bear Attacks,” detailing fatal encounters with polar bears found that most involved either subadult bears — usually males who are hungry all the time — or older bears who are injured or ill and have difficulty getting enough calories.
“Both species of bear are more willing to take risks, as we’ve seen here in Wales,” Yorke said.
Unlike brown or black bears, polar bears do not hibernate during the winter. Only pregnant females enter snow dens and only for breeding.
All other polar bears are outdoors, usually on sea ice, where their prey is available year-round.
The Alaska Polar Bear Co-Management Council, which was created to represent “the collective voice of Alaska Natives in the co-management of polar bears,” said on its website that polar bears near or entering villages constitute permanent community safety concerns.
The group notes several polar bear patrol programs in Alaska, including one for Wells, which it says is seeking funding to sustain operations. Another, in the home village of Diomede, works with a patrol mainly in the winter to guard children going to and from school.
York, who has worked in the Arctic for about 30 years, 21 of which have been spent in Alaska, said the Wells community has long been involved in establishing a polar bear patrol program and taking measures to keep polar bears out of the community .
“This seems to be just one of those horrible cases where, even though we were doing the right things, we had a bear that was an extraordinary time of year that you would never expect to happen,” he said.
Desrocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, said the site of the attack is far south in the polar bears’ range, but it is not unusual for them to be there.
The polar bear is from a population in the Chukchi Sea that is doing well in the face of climate change, Desrocher said. That means the attack may be the result of the bear being drawn to attractants like food or garbage more than factors related to climate change, he said.
Polar bears near the southern Beaufort Sea, east of the Chukchi Sea population, are in worse shape, Desrocher said.
In this case, although there is ice in the Chukchi and northern Bering Seas, the quality of the ice is not well known. More importantly, York said, it is not known what happens under the ice or what the availability of seals and other prey is for the polar bears.
The changes also occur in the winter, when people thought they were safe from the polar bears that were on the coast, York said.
“Communities may no longer be,” he said.
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