Fat Bear Week 2024 takes a grisly turn when the camera captures a deadly fight

Fat Bear Week, a popular tradition that marks the start of the hibernation season, has been postponed after a deadly fight between two bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska.

Every year, Katmai National Park in southern Alaska celebrates its brown bears with a bracket competition where fans can vote for their favorite and fattest bear. While this year's relay was scheduled to be announced on Monday, September 30, a deadly fight between two Alaskan grizzly bears has postponed the competition.

The two bears – a male named 402 and “Patches” and a female named 402 – were captured fighting each other at the Brooks River on the park's livestream. The attack resulted in the deaths of 402 people who sank in the water.

Mike Fritz – who works for Explore.org, which runs Fat Bear Week – spoke about the fight during a livestream and explained that the vote would be delayed.

“Today a bear killed another bear on the river. It was captured live on the webcams and we thought we couldn't move forward with unveiling our Fat Bear Week series without addressing this situation first,” he said, revealing that the fight probably started over food.

“We love celebrating the success of bears with full stomachs and plenty of body fat,” he added. “But the ferocity of bears is real, the risks they face are real, their lives can be hard and their deaths painful.”

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During the livestream, Katmai Park Ranger Sarah Bruce revealed that bears are typically more violent in the lead-up to hibernation as they typically try to eat as much as possible before hiding for the winter months. “I don’t know why a bear would want to expend so much energy killing another bear for food,” she said. “It is unusual for a bear to prey on another bear, but it is not completely impossible. So it’s hard to say how this started.”

Bruce later explained it to the Washington Post that when the bears are violent towards each other, the fights are usually short-lived. However, this lasted 20 minutes.

This year's Fat Bear Week series will now be released on Tuesday, October 1st at 7pm ET, with voting ending a week later on October 8th.

Fat Bear Week was launched back in 2014 under the name Fat Bear Tuesday. The event was created by Katmai National Park with the goal of celebrating the park's brown bears and the healthy ecosystem of its Brooks River. Fat Bear Tuesday was so successful that it was expanded into Fat Bear Week the following year.

Every year, park rangers hold a tournament-like round in which individual brown bears compete against each other, and the public can vote online to decide who advances in each round.

In 2023, 128 Grazer was crowned winner after finishing in the bottom two against 32 Chunk. According to Explore.org, she received 108,321 votes to Chunk's 23,134 votes.

“The brave girl grounded the guy,” Katmai National Park posted on Facebook at the time. “The Mondo mountain of a male, 32 Chunk, proved his prominent rear end was worth a whopping win (Chin up, Chunk). But in the end, Chunk was grazered. Long live the queen!”