Mother brown bear kills cub on Katmai Bear Cam

The animal kingdom is brutal—and thanks to modern technology, us humans often have a front-row seat to its unforgiving nature. The Brooks River live-cams captured a young brown bear cub being killed and eaten by an unrelated mother bear (Bear 806) on Tuesday morning.

The killed cub was born this spring and the child of Bear 909, a 10-year-old brown bear. Bear 909 started the season with two cubs, but has now lost both.

Explore.org operates the Brooks River livecams within Alaska’s Katmai National Park and held a special live chat to discuss the situation on Tuesday afternoon. Resident naturalist Mike Fitz alongside park rangers Christine Loberg and Sarah Bruce hosted the chat about the “challenging” incident. The team shared that while infanticide by female adults does occur, this is likely the first documented case of it occurring at Brooks River.

Bear 806 had her own two cubs with her at time of the attack: a 2.5-year-old cub and 1.5-year-old cub. The 2.5-year-old cub, nicknamed “Biggie” (Junior 128), was adopted by Bear 806 earlier this spring after being abandoned by her mother, two-time Fat Bear Week champion, Grazer. Bear 806’s cubs were seen interacting with the cub prior to the attack. After pursuing and killing the cub, Bear 806 was seen feeding on the cub’s body as her two cubs looked on. She later buried the carcass after feeding on it for about 20 minutes.

Another unidentified bear later dug the cub and dragged the cub’s body away. Viewers speculated it could’ve been the cub’s mother (Bear 909), but Fitz couldn’t positively identify her. Bear 909 was later seen near the scene, chasing away other bears.

When asked for a potential reason behind the brutal attack, Fitz said: “We can be absolutely certain that this is not a case of sexually selected infanticide, which is one explanation. That sort of infanticide is driven by a male adult bear wanting to mate with a female bear and killing a cub that it’s not its own offspring so that that male bear can pass its own genes along. And so there are no male bears in involved in this sort of situation.”

The explore.org experts also don’t suspect hunger as a motivation for the attack, saying the river provides plenty of salmon for the bears to fatten up. The team did note that the bear cub running away from Bear 806 may have triggered a “predatory response.”

“We tell folks when they arrive at Brooks Camp if you encounter a bear, do not run,” Bruce said. “You should never run from a bear because although we see these bears doing all kinds of things, they are predators as well. We see them mostly predating on on fish, but today we did see a predation kind of happen with a cub and we’ve seen that before on bear cam as well. Bears are predators.”

When asked how they cope with the challenges of nature being nature, the park rangers were reflective. “Being able to bear witness to a lot of these things that we wouldn’t be able to witness otherwise without these cameras,” Bruce said. “I constantly have to remind myself that I too am a part of this wild planet. This happening on bear cam is not separate from me also living on this earth. This is just kind of what it means to kind of be alive.”

Fans of the bear cams can view the full discussion on YouTube. Warning: The video below includes footage of the attack and aftermath.

806 Cub Attack Breakdown 7.28.26 | Brooks Live Chat

Stay tuned to Popular Science for on-going coverage of the Brooks River bears and Fat Bear Week.

 

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