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(Trends Wide) — A woman and a child were killed by a polar bear attacking residents of a small, remote Alaskan community, state police said Tuesday.
The bear had chased residents after entering the western Alaska town of Wales before attacking the woman and child, according to an Alaska State Police report.
The bear was shot and killed by another resident while attacking the two victims, according to the report.
“Officers and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game are working to travel to Wales when weather conditions permit,” the report said.
Wales is located on the west coast of Alaska and has a population of 168, according to the United States Census. The identities of the victims were not immediately released as next of kin were still being notified, police said.
Attacks are rare, study says
Reports of polar bear attacks on humans are extremely rare, according to a 2017 study published by The Wildlife Society. “Between 1870 and 2014, we documented 73 attacks by wild polar bears, distributed among the 5 polar bear range States (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States), resulting in 20 human deaths and 63 human injuries,” he found.
But melting ice due to climate change has caused a change in bear behavior and made human encounters with them more likely, Trends Wide previously reported.
Residents of Churchill, in northern Manitoba, Canada, sometimes called the “polar bear capital of the world,” told Trends Wide in 2021 that bear encounters were becoming more frequent. Thousands of tourists visit the area each fall hoping to see a polar bear, the world’s largest carnivore.
Bear season in the area peaks in October and November, just before Hudson Bay freezes over and bears begin migrating north and congregating near the shoreline.
In recent decades, bear season has lasted longer due to climate change, residents say. Ice melts sooner and freezes later, so bears stay on land longer.
But attacks on humans remain rare. The last was in 2013, according to the Reuters news agency, and there had not been a deadly attack since the early 1980s, Trends Wide reported in 2021.
