Kenai, Minnesota Zoo’s largest grizzly bear, dies

Kenai, one of the Minnesota Zoo’s three grizzly bears, has died. The 17-year-old Alaska native was in the latter stages of liver cancer, zoo officials said in a social media post announcing his death.

He arrived in Minnesota in 2008 accompanied by two other orphaned bears: Sadie and Haines. Kenai was found as an 8-month-old runt and sent to live in the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center. He weighed 28 pounds. Like Haines, Kenai was named after the Alaskan city where he was found.

Kenai weighed 320 pounds when he landed in Minnesota by way of a FedEx plane that carried him and the other two orphaned bears. Grizzly bears weigh between 400 and 600 pounds on average, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They typically live about 25 years.

“Although unrelated, they acted in many ways like siblings, with Kenai being lovingly referred to as the laid back ‘little brother’ — always willing to tag along with Haines and let Sadie be the unquestioned leader of their group,” zoo officials wrote on social media. “This is a hard loss for our staff and the Zoo as a whole. Kenai was an important ambassador for his wild counterparts and his presence will be dearly missed.”

Kenai’s playful nature was well-documented. When one of the three bears hurled a rock at a glass pane and shattered it in 2015, zoo officials were left scratching their heads and wondering which of them was responsible. Kenai was named a bear of interest.

Kenai was “usually the clown out there, fooling around in the water,” Tony Fisher, the zoo’s animal collections manager, said at the time. “He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just being a bear.”

The episode was reported around the world. Officials said they tracked 1.3 billion unique visitors to various stories that covered it in the days that followed.