Fat Bear Week delayed after rival bear deathmatch what started the fight?

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 ...