In a seldom-seen video recorded in Canada, Susan Griffith from British Columbia shares footage on Facebook of a grizzly bear launching a vicious attack on and brutally mauling a black bear.
It may be hard to watch for some, but holy moly, this is one of the craziest videos I've seen on the internet - and that's saying a lot!
Graphic warning! 🚨🫣
Apparently, everyone but me is aware that bears eat bears... 😳😬
Here's the Facebook link if you want to watch more and read the comments.
Not something you see every day!
Susan captured the footage on her way home, but she wasn't sure if the brown bear killed the black bear or just happened upon it and decided to teach its corpse a lesson. This type of behavior isn't uncommon, although black bears can usually get away up in trees.
According to Yahoo:
Grizzly bears are apex predators but are also prolific scavengers and will eat whatever they find, including other bears and members of their own species. They are known to kill and eat black bears in areas where the two species overlap.
...
Frank T van Manen, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and team lead of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said there are few estimates on how often grizzly and black bears interact, but it is not unusual for them to encounter one another.
According to Manen:
Grizzly bears are formidable predators and sometimes pursue large prey such as elk and sometimes even bison, and occasionally that includes species like American black bears. This looks to be a smaller black bear and it is no match for an adult grizzly. We have documented a number of instances like this in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, including one male grizzly that pulled a black bear out of a den (i.e. this occurred in late fall), completely consumed it over the course of days and repeated the same pattern with another denned black bear about a week or two later.
This is the period of hyperphagia [extreme hunger] for bears when they fatten up for hibernation, and consuming a black bear that already has lots of fat storage makes sense from their life history perspective.
Nature, you're wild!
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