Fat Bear Week postponed due to bear-on-bear murder

We’re big fans of Fat Bear Week, the lighthearted annual bracket where fans of fat bears get to vote on the fattest of them all, here at The A.V. Club. With that being said, it gives us absolutely no pleasure to report that this year’s competition has been postponed because one of the bears murdered another in cold blood. Nature is a cruel, cruel place. 

The rotund competitors were supposed to be revealed on Monday, but the National Park Service respectfully chose to hold the announcement in order to mourn Bear 402, who was killed live on webcam while indulging in a casual salmon hunt yesterday. Both 402—an older female grizzly who competed in last year’s bracket—and her younger male assailant, 469, lived in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, a major feeding destination for bears looking to bulk up before going into hibernation. 

“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 webcam host Explore.org, said in a conversation held in place of the unveiling, via CBS News. The moment of silence for “beloved” Bear 402 will only last a day, however; the bracket will now be revealed tonight at 7 p.m. ET.

Fritz and Sarah Bruce, a park ranger at Katmai, both told CBS that the grizzly murder (sorry!) was “difficult to watch.” Cover your eyes, kids, because 469’s potential motive is deeply, deeply harrowing. It’s, uh… well, it could have been bear cannibalism. “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 [to prep for hibernation],” 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.”

It’s a sobering reminder that as much fun as it is for us to vote on bears and their blubber from the safety of our homes, on the other side of the webcam, they’re much closer to the beast from The Revenant than they are to Paddington or the one from the honey bottles. “National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” Matt Johnson, a rep from the National Park Service, added. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”

R.I.P. Bear 402; hopefully you’ll be even fatter in the next life.