According to reports in local media, the attack happened in the village of Wales, a predominantly Inupiaq settlement on the Seward Peninsula that sits on the Bering Sea. A polar bear was reported entering the village and chasing several residents.
A police report detailed the bear was seen attacking a woman and her 1-year-old child by another Wales resident, who shot and killed the bear during its attack. However, it wasn’t enough to save the pair, who died of their injuries.
The police report didn’t mention the names of the victims. Authorities were unable to reach Wales from elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, due to poor weather conditions.
Bizarrely, the attack happened during what should have been the safest time of year in the town: polar bears tend to come on land during the summer, when the sea ice recedes, and venture back out onto the ice during winter to hunt.
“I would have been walking around the community of Wales probably without any (bear) deterrents because it’s historically the time of year that’s safe,” Geoff York, the senior director of conservation at Polar Bear International, told US media. “You don’t expect to run into bears because they’d be out on the sea ice hunting seals and doing their thing.”
The massive predators are the continent’s largest predators, with a fully grown male polar bear weighing in at some 1,200 pounds. However, fatal attacks on humans are rare, with Tuesday’s being the first in Alaska since 1990.
US Fish & Wildlife Service guidelines on encountering polar bears say the best course of action is to not encounter them at all, but if you do, to group together and prepare to defend yourselves. Playing dead doesn’t work, so you are encouraged to fight back by any means necessary, including killing the bear.
Deadly attacks on humans have been associated by researchers with starvation and stresses on the bear’s habitat, such as thawing sea ice that limits their hunting time and brings them closer to humans. As the global climate continues to warm, scientists are worried that the loss of Arctic sea ice could lead to the extinction of the polar bear before the end of the century.