Nature red in tooth and claw rewrote the cute Fat Bear Week storyline on Monday, when one mammoth brown bear killed a smaller bear while both were fishing for salmon.
In a vivid, live-streamed display, the male bear dispatched the female along the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve. It was the first on-camera mauling of its kind since the National Park Service inaugurated the super-popular fat bear celebration in 2014.
“The ferocity of bears is real, the risks that they face are real,” Michael Fitz, author of The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska’s Brooks River, noted in a blow-by-blow video account for Explore.org. “Their lives can be hard and their deaths can be painful.”
The aggressor bear, identified as 469, attacked the female bear, identified as 402, at about 9:30 a.m. Alaska time on Monday as they neared each other downriver from Brooks Falls.
