Fat Bear Week Delayed After Rival Bear Death Match – What Started The War?

He could not stand the competition.

Fat Bear Week is back, but the fearsome nature of bears has put the “celebration of success and survival” on hiatus.

The bracket for the contest was set to be revealed on Monday, but when a fatal fight between two grizzlies from Alaska was caught live, the announcement was pushed back to Tuesday.

A male bear, with identification number 469 and referred to as “Patches,” killed a female bear, with identification number 402, near the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park & ​​Preserve.

“National parks like Katmai protect not only natural wonders but also harsh realities. “Every bear seen on webcams is competing with others to survive,” the park said in a statement to CBS.

The breach was caught on a popular webcam that follows bears in the river around 9:30 a.m. Monday.

“Earlier today, a bear killed another bear in the river. It was caught live on webcams, and we thought, well, we can’t go ahead with the reveal of our Fat Bear Week bracket without first addressing this situation,” said Mike Fritz, resident naturalist at Explore.org, in Monday’s live broadcast at the site of the scheduled unveiling, via CBS.

According to the National Park Service, the Brooks River is a protected area on the Alaska Peninsula that harbors some of the region’s largest bears as they hunt for sockeye salmon. Bears are currently preparing to hibernate as they hunt the end of the seasonal salmon run.

Fritz and Sarah Bruce, a park ranger in Katmai, agreed that the fight between the two bears was likely not just a confrontation over food, as it was too prolonged and difficult to watch.

“We know this time of year bears are in that state of hyperphagia and they eat anything and everything they can,” Bruce said. “I don’t know why a bear would want to spend so much energy trying to kill another bear as a food source. It is unusual to see a bear leading another bear, but it is not completely out of the question. So it’s hard to say how this started.”

According to the North American Bear Center, hyperphagia is a period of excessive eating and drinking to gain weight for hibernation.

While Fritz and Bruce said it wasn’t clear what started the fight, ultimately they believe Bear 469 ended up seeing Bear 402 as potential prey.

“Whatever caused this initially stimulated a predatory or continued predatory response by 469,” Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy and Sarah Bruce, a ranger at Katmai National Park, told NPR in the video.

Boak noted that the female bear was almost as big as the male bear that killed her, “so she fought and fought and kept fighting.”

Fritz said it appeared that Bear 402 eventually died of drowning after being overpowered and ending up in the water.

“This is very difficult to see and understand,” 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.â€

Fat Bear Week, which starts from October. 4-10, celebrates the “resilience, adaptability and strength” of Katmai’s brown bears, and the bears are competing against each other in a tournament-style competition through a bracket. Fans can vote online on which gold is ultimately crowned champion.

The contest is in its 10th year and features 12 bears. Voting for this year’s group is open until October. 8.

“We like to celebrate the success of bears with full stomachs and plenty of body fat,” Fritz said. “But the ferocity of bears is real, the dangers 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 cubs, more than any other bear currently in the Brooks River,” according to the National Park Service.

Fortunately for Bear 469, Bruce said there will be no interference.

“The park won’t do anything to the bear, 469,” she said. “You know, it’s just part of bear behavior and life. It’s one of the saddest parts of it, one of the hardest parts of it. But we’ll probably just let nature play its way.â€