Fat Bear Week 2024 postponed after fatal bear fight broadcast live

The start of Fat Bear Week 2024, which was scheduled to begin Monday, did not go as planned after two Alaskan grizzly bears engaged in a brutal live fight in Katmai National Park, leaving one dead. As a result, the reveal of this year’s contestants in the March Madness category was pushed back to Tuesday evening.

The tournament has been hosted annually by Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve since 2014, giving bear fans the opportunity to vote for which of the park’s brown bears has had the greatest success preparing for hibernation. However, this is the first year the competition has been affected by violence between bears.

According to CBS NewsThe fight took place between a previous competitor, an older female bear known as Bear 402, and a male brown bear identified as Bear 469, at the mouth of the Brooks River in Katmai, where the bears feed of sockeye salmon to fatten up during the winter months. It’s unclear what sparked the encounter, but national park officials said it didn’t appear to be a typical confrontation over food.

Mike Fritz, resident naturalist at Explore.org, the multimedia organization hosting the livestream, explained Monday during what would have been the annual unveiling why the competition was delayed.

“Earlier today a bear killed another bear on the river. It was captured live on the webcams and we figured we couldn’t continue our Fat Bear Week reveal without first addressing this situation,” Fritz said. “We like to celebrate the success of bears with full bellies and plentiful body fat. But the ferocity of bears is real, the risks they face are real, their lives can be hard, and their deaths can be painful.”

Fritz added that bear 402 was “beloved” and unfortunately most likely died from drowning.

Katmai Park Ranger Sarah Bruce noted that when bears are in a state of hyperphagia – the period of excessive food consumption that occurs in late summer and fall – they eat everything that they can. But that still doesn’t explain the confrontation between the two apex predators.

“I don’t know why a bear would want to expend so much energy trying to kill another bear as a food source,” Bruce said. “It’s rare to see a bear attack another bear, but it’s not completely out of the question. So it’s hard to say how it started.”

“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” National Park Service spokesman Matt Johnson said in a statement. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with the others to survive.”