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Photo by Steve Ringman/Seattle Times/KRT

You get bears running through the towns looking for food once the bone pile starts to shrink

During whaling season, “there’s a lot of good food there, if you’re a polar bear,” he said.

With gut piles as tall as the polar bears, they spend weeks picking the whale bones — gorging themselves on blubber, organs and muscle tissue, Barrow resident Nagruk Harcharek said.

“The bears see these bowhead whales are harvested and dropped off at the same time, in the same place every year. The carcasses are a predictable food source for the bears,” Connecticut University professor Melissa McKinney said.

That’s why the number of bears on shore has risen steadily, from none 20 years ago to dozens at a time in 2017. The carcass deposit studied was visited by 82 polar bears in one day, Atwood said.

The bears appear to be living better for it, Atwood said, at least in the short term.

Is this a good news story, in the short term? Yeah. But the bowhead whale carcasses are a finite resource

“The bears don’t have to do a lot of foraging, they just walk about 500 yards. They eat a bunch and pick at the bones. Then they go and sleep the rest of the day and then they come back and eat.” The deposit allows the bears to recover many of the calories lost travelling and fasting while the ice receded. Science Daily noted this has caused a significant increase in the beached bears’ body mass index.

Though rotting bowhead whale meat has its own pitfalls, the study found it may have caused the bears’ mercury levels to drop. When the study began in 2004, McKinney said, a study revealed a mercury concentration of 5.4 micrograms per gram of hair. Mercury levels above 5 micrograms per gram of hair can impede neurological development and cognitive function and adversely affect bears’ livers and kidneys. By the end of the study, the mercury concentration was closer to 2 micrograms.