“There are close to 150,000 bears living in Alaska – that’s about one for every five people in the state.”
National Geographic Kids 5,000 Awesome Facts, 2015
There are 3 species of bears that live in Alaska. That is the brown bear, the black bear, and the polar bear. Those all break up into 6 sub categories which some are listed below.
However, there is about 8 species of bears in the world with many of them having subcategories, but I’ll just write about Alaska’s little family of bears. After all, this is a fact on just Alaska and their bears, so I did my best not to go too crazy on the bear facts of life.
Black, Brown and Polar Bear & sub categories
- Brown Bear
2. Black Bear
3. Alaska Peninsula Brown Bear
4. Glacier Bear
5. Kodiak Bear
- Polar Bear
I had no idea there was such a wide variety of these guys.
The most abundant of the bears is the Black Bear, with 100,000 in population in Alaska.
The Brown bear, which is also called a Grizzly, is about 30,000 in quantity. There are the other brown babies, the Kodiak Bear and the coastal bear. The difference of the bears is the basic location of the bear. The Kodiak bear only lives on the Kodiak Archipelago, which includes a variety of islands. There are about 3,500 Kodiak bears in these areas, and they are unique because they have been isolated for over 12,000 years from all other bears. I thought that was a cool bear fact to throw in.
The Polar bear, which is the most powerful of the bears, has a population of 4700. I was surprised to find out they are not on the close to extinction list, but they are in protection. They come in contact with man more than any other bear, so they are known as the most aggressive of species.
Added up, 100,000 Black, 4700 Polar, and 30,000 Brown bears comes to about 17,700 bears in Alaska today.
Population of humans in Alaska today is about 755,583, whereas in 2015 the population was about 738,430 people. Roughly the ratio of man to bear is still about the same, 1 in 4.26.
It’s a good thing that Alaska is so spread out and sparsely populated or there would probably be a major human and bear population problem. Keep those bears far in the mountains, on glaciers or on the Archipelago islands. That would be terrifying to come in contact with one of those animals. I’ve only heard one when I was hiking with my summer camp in Colorado. That camp counselor turned white as a ghost. I’m glad I didn’t realize it was a bear until we were out of the area. That was my close call.
Anybody else have a close call?
CHARLEY WAFFLE 