There is a tremendous amount of ignorance about polar bears. There has never been a good survey of the population.
Measurements are not available to large areas of their range.
Several hundred to over a thousand were harvested (estimated for Russia) for over a hundred years. 450 a year in the Russian area, which included Svalbard, were harvested from 1700 to 1875, according to one Russian researcher, Upenski.
You cannot harvest that many over that long unless the population can easily produce that many.
We really do not know how many polar bears there are, or what the carrying capacity is of their range.
The amount which can be harvested is certainly over 500 a year and is probably over 3000 a year, which would be about 15% of the lower estimates of their current population.
There could be 50,000 polar bears on the planet... We simply do not know. Researchers don’t like to release population data, probably because their population forecasts, based on false assumptions about climate change, have been so wildly wrong.
We know they can swim a long way because periodically one ends up in Iceland and gets shot to the dismay of the tree huggers. The shortest distance between the two is 186 miles snd average is a lot greater than that. Icelandic authorities estimated that it swam about 300 miles to get there from Greenland.
We know that they are not endangered and they’re extremely dangerous.
We know that they drink Coke. And i personally know I’m glad they stay in the high northern latitudes.