Fat Bear Week, a celebration of brown bears’ survival instincts, brought a grisly reminder of the animals’ predatory nature on Monday, when a male bear, 469, killed a female, 402, at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska.

The unsettling scene was captured by a popular live webcam that follows the bears on the Brooks River.

In a statement sent to NPR, the park said, “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 deadly fight took place around 9:30 a.m. in Alaska, as organizers prepared to kick off Fat Bear Week, the competition that lets fans crown the bear who successfully added the most weight as they prepare for their annual hibernation cycle. After the shocking death of 402, the unveiling of the 2024 bracket was delayed from Monday until 7 p.m. ET Tuesday.

As stunned viewers watched online, the two bears engaged in a lengthy and violent fight in deep water at the river’s mouth — a clash that eventually ended with one bear dying, and the other dragging her body ashore.

“Very difficult to see. I mean, 402 is a beloved bear by each and every one of us,” Mike Fitz, the resident naturalist with webcam company Explore.org, said in a video in which he and two Katmai Park experts discussed the incident.

“I honestly, you know, I think we’re all in a little bit of a loss of words,” Fitz said.

Editor’s Note: The video below depicts the bears’ deadly fight, and a discussion about their actions.

Both bears have been known to rangers for more than 20 years. 402 was “the mother of at least eight litters, more than any other bear currently at Brooks River. This includes two litters of four cubs apiece,” the national park said last year. In 2013, 469 won fans by overcoming a serious injury to his left hind leg and foot to fish at Brooks Falls. One year earlier, he was seen with an unidentified bear’s remains.

Fitz and the other experts — Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy, and Sarah Bruce, a ranger at Katmai National Park — said that while it wasn’t clear what prompted the clash, 469 came to see 402 as potential prey. 

“Whatever caused this initially stimulated a predatory or continuing predatory reaction by 469,” Boak said in the video, noting that 402, a well-known large female, was nearly as big as 469. “So she fought, she fought and continued to fight.”

The footage suggests that 402 died from drowning as she was overpowered, Fitz said.

“This is very difficult to watch and comprehend,” Boak said. She added, “we can feel these things but we can’t anthropomorphize what’s going on and assume that a bear’s behavior is like our behavior. It’s very different, these are wild animals.”

For those who enjoy watching the bears of Katmai Park, 469’s killing of 402 is a reminder of a stark reality: While the gigantic brown bears are oblivious to their roles in an annual online bracket, they’re also apex predators that are very aware of the competition for food and space — and raw calories.

“He’s essentially predating on this other bear, he’s a predator towards this female bear,” Bruce said.

“We do know that this time of year, bears are in that state of hyperphagia and they are eating anything and everything they can,” she added, referring to a condition described as an insatiable drive to consume food.

“I don’t know why a bear would want to expend so much energy trying to kill another bear as a food source,” Bruce said. “It’s an uncommon thing to see a bear predating on another bear. But it’s not completely out of the question.”

In response to viewers’ questions, Bruce said that after the deadly fight, 402’s body was spotted in the woods, where 469 apparently placed it as a food cache. But another law of nature soon took effect: hierarchy. A dominant bear dubbed 32 Chunk ousted 469 and took over the carcass, Bruce said.

As for 469’s future, Bruce said rangers will not intervene.

“The park’s not gonna do anything to the bear, to 469,” she said. “You know, it’s just kind of part of bear behavior and bear life. It’s one of the sadder parts of it, one of the more difficult parts of it. But we’re certainly just going to allow nature to play out as it does.”

36 days
until election day

Early voting, by mail and in person, surged in the 2020 presidential election — driving a massive increase in overall turnout and helping Joseph R. Biden Jr. secure his victory. This year, we’re tracking how the early vote will unfold without pandemic-era restrictions, and what it can tell us about the effects of new laws in some competitive states.

The strength of early voting in this election will be important for the campaigns of both former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2020, about 60 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of Republicans voted by mail, according to a study by the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab.

Despite Mr. Trump’s frequent false claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, Republicans have made efforts to encourage early voting in this election. In Pennsylvania, the party has pledged more than $10 million to persuade Republicans to vote by mail in November, but as of late September, only about 373,000 Republicans had requested absentee ballots, compared with 881,000 Democrats.

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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House

A boy has a crush on a girl and tells everyone how great she is. The girl does not feel the same way and picks another suitor. The boy gets on the public announcement system to tell the entire school that he loathes her. That is what happened between Donald Trump and Taylor Swift. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Trump posted shortly after the superstar endorsed Kamala Harris last month. Until then he would regularly compliment Swift, saying last November: “I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful.”

Trump’s superpower is that teams of psychologists could spend all their hours dissecting such moments and still not dent the material. It is even harder for America’s media to do justice to the random nuttiness of his streams of consciousness. The only way to understand his state of mind is to watch every rally to the end or read all the transcripts. Ninety-nine per cent of voters do not have the time. Which means that Trump is treated as the same old Trump, eliciting familiar shrugs with the latest childish insult or outrageous vow.

You could smuggle a sharp cognitive decline into Trump’s persona and few would notice. In politics, this offers a rare form of hurricane insurance.

Crowds leave his events early. Yet according to Trump on Monday, Harris and Joe Biden have deprived him of the Secret Service protection needed for booking larger venues, which leaves tens of thousands of disappointed Trump rally-goers waiting outside. 

That this is fiction goes without saying. But it is hard to record such instances several times a day without seeming obsessional. The US media can thus come across like the proverbial blind man feeling an elephant. The scale and strangeness of the object is impossible to grasp. Trump’s words are therefore summed up in abbreviated — and coherent-sounding — form. The media’s leftwing critics call this “sanewashing”. A better term might be “Trumped”. 

Nobody who rewatches Trump in 2016 and compares him with today could deny that his memory is patchier and his vocabulary smaller. Even when he avoids familiar tangents about Hannibal Lecter and death by electrocution or sharks, his repetition is notable. “Kamala is mentally impaired,” Trump said at the weekend. “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. It’s sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way.”

The question arises why 81-year-old Biden stepped down from his party’s nomination while 78-year-old Trump has faced no such calls. The simple answer is that Democrats were panicked. Biden would probably have lost the election to Trump. Voters could see his physical appearance, which looks far more frail than Trump’s. If they read what each of them says, however, they would get a different impression. Biden sometimes forgets his point and often trails off. But his transcribed thoughts are not crazy. Harris can sound halting, especially on economic issues. But she shows no hint of being “mentally disabled” as Trump just called her. 

Which brings us back to Trump’s own mental state. Five weeks from now, America could elect a man who has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants. He has not ruled out setting up a network of detention camps. Such steps will be necessary, he says, because migrants are lethal. “They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” he said in Prairie du Chien last weekend. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members.”

The media has largely failed to probe how US law enforcement would uproot millions across the nation without involving mass-scale violence. How could Swat teams raiding hundreds of neighbourhoods figure out who is illegal? Many families are a mix of documented and undocumented. Would they rip mothers from their children? Mass deportation is the thread that runs through almost all of Trump’s meanderings. 

From tax cuts and tariff wars to wholesale oil drilling, Trump’s other promises appeal to specific groups of Americans. But a strikingly large number of voters across the board support mass deportation. If Americans knew what that would mean in practice, many would reconsider. It is a measure of Trump’s ability to distract people, including the media, that this central feature of his plan is known only in the abstract. Yet it could permanently alter the face of America. 

edward.luce@ft.com