On the final day of September 2024, the Fats Bear Week contest was set to start. However two brown bears had been caught in a lethal wrestle that was reside streamed the world over.
The 2 bruins bobbed up and down on the Brooks River on the Alaskan peninsula, splashing, tussling, and snapping their jaws at each other. The male bear, 469, drowned the feminine bear, 402, and took bites from her physique.
Researchers say that, whereas killing and cannibalism are regular elements of bear conduct, it’s unattainable to know why bear 469 attacked bear 402 when he did. Michael Fitz, naturalist and Fats Bear Week founder, says he usually finds himself wishing he may ask bears why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Cannibalism within the Animal Kingdom
From an evolutionary perspective, members of 1’s personal species — identified to biologists as conspecifics — are a valuable potential meals supply for animals of their contest to outlive and reproduce.
But, the danger of cannibalizing a diseased conspecific appears to offset this profit. Cannibalism has additionally transmitted neurodegenerative ailments, akin to mad cow illness, and, in people, a illness referred to as kuru.
Learn Extra: Why Cannibalism Is A Widespread Habits For Some Animals
Bear Habits and Historical past
On this case, Larry Van Daele, who has spent over 4 many years working with coastal brown bears, notes that bear 469’s patches of lighter-colored fur, from which he will get his nickname Patches, could also be “outdated scars from critical wounds obtained throughout battles with different bears.” In 2012, bear 469 Patches was discovered guarding the physique of one other lifeless bear that rangers described as a meals cache.
Every bear additionally has a definite persona and historical past, suggesting that bear 402 and 469, who had been each older bears, might have already been accustomed to each other, and that this unknown historical past might have been a consider 469’s aggression.
After bear 469 dragged the physique of 402 to shore, Fats Bear Week’s most dominant Brooks-River bear, 32, took over the physique and proceeded to feed on it.
“When a bear finds one other lifeless bear, they don’t appear to be shy about consuming a lifeless bear,” Fitz advised me.
Seasonal Starvation for Bears
Though bear 469 appeared fats and wholesome to bear consultants, the animal’s seasonal hyperphagic urge for food — an excessive type of starvation — should still have been an element within the killing. Katmai ranger Sarah Bruce factors out that the bear fanatic Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard had been additionally killed by a bear with hyperphagia in 2003.
The Fats Bear Week organizers discovered bear 402’s dying upsetting, despite the fact that they acknowledged the killing as regular wild bear conduct. Naomi Boak, Katmai Conservancy communications and media marketing consultant, means that it’s useful for folks to see brown bears because the wild creatures that they’re.
“I feel it’s therapeutic to have a deep connection to nature as a result of we as human beings usually don’t face the realities of our personal lives and dying,” Boak says. “And I feel that studying from different creatures, different dwelling beings, and never anthropomorphizing, however studying about their worlds, and the lives they face, helps us perceive our personal lives higher.”
Learn Extra: Cannibals in Nature Are Extra Widespread than As soon as Thought
Article Sources
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