He couldn’t bear the competition.
Fat Bear Week has returned, but the grisly nature of bears has brought the “celebration of success and survival” to a pause.
The brackets for the competition were set to be revealed on Monday, but when a fatal fight between two Alaskan grizzlies was caught on livestream, the announcement was pushed back to Tuesday.
A male bear, with the identification number 469 and referred to as “Patches,” killed a female bear, identification number 402, by the Brooks River in Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska.
“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities. Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive,” the park said in a statement to CBS.
The mauling was caught on a popular webcam that follows the bears on the river at around 9:30 a.m. on Monday.
“Earlier today, a bear killed another bear on the river. It was caught live on the webcams and we thought, well, we can’t go ahead with our Fat Bear Week bracket reveal without addressing this situation first,” Mike Fritz, the resident naturalist at Explore.org, said on Monday’s livestream held in place of the scheduled unveiling, per CBS.
The Brooks River is a protected area on the Alaskan peninsula that brings in some of the region’s largest bears as they hunt for sockeye salmon, according to the National Park Service. The bears are currently preparing to enter hibernation as they hunt the end of the seasonal salmon run.
Fritz and Sarah Bruce, a park ranger at Katmai, agreed that the fight between the two bears was not likely just a confrontation over food as it was too drawn out and hard to watch.
“We do know at this time of year that bears are in that state of hyperphagia, and they are eating anything and everything they can,” Bruce said. “I don’t know why a bear would want to expend so much energy trying to kill another bear as a food source. It’s an uncommon thing to see a bear predating on another bear, but it’s not completely out of the question. So it’s hard to say how this started.”
Hyperphagia is a period of excessive eating and drinking to fatten for hibernation, according to the North American Bear Center.
While Fritz and Bruce said it wasn’t clear what started the altercation, ultimately they believe Bear 469 ended up seeing Bear 402 as potential prey.
“Whatever caused this initially stimulated a predatory or continuing predatory reaction by 469,” Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy, and Sarah Bruce, a ranger at Katmai National Park, said in the video, per NPR.
Boak noted that the female bear was nearly as big as the male bear that killed her, “so she fought, she fought and continued to fight.”
Fritz said it appeared that Bear 402 ultimately died from drowning after being overpowered and ending up in the water.
“This is very difficult to watch and comprehend,” Boak said. “She added, “We can feel these things but we can’t anthropomorphize what’s going on and assume that a bear’s behavior is like our behavior. It’s very different, these are wild animals.”
Fat Bear Week, which runs from Oct. 4-10, celebrates Katmai’s brown bears’ “resilience, adaptability and strength,” and the bears are competing against each other in a tournament-style competition through a bracket. Fans can vote online for which bear is ultimately crowned the champion.
The contest is in its 10th year and features 12 bears. Voting for this year’s bracket is open until Oct. 8.
“We love to celebrate the success of bears with full stomachs and ample body fat,” said Fritz. “But the ferocity of bears is real, the risks that they face are real, their lives can be hard and their deaths can be painful.”
Bear 402 never won Fat Bear Week, but she was “the mother of at least eight litters, more than any other bear currently at Brooks River,” according to the National Park Service.
As for the fate of Bear 469, Bruce said there will be no intervention.
“The park’s not gonna do anything to the bear, to 469,” she said. “You know, it’s just kind of part of bear behavior and bear life. It’s one of the sadder parts of it, one of the more difficult parts of it. But we’re certainly just going to allow nature to play out as it does.”