Fat Bear Week is back, and this year’s bears are really chunky.
The brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve have been bulking up this summer on what officials say are unusually large sockeye salmon runs. Starting Tuesday, you can vote online for the one you want to be crowned the chubby champion.
Think of Fat Bear Week as March Madness, but swap in thousand-pound bears for basketball teams.
The bigger the bear is, the better, said Katmai park ranger Sarah Bruce.
“There is no such thing as too fat of a bear,” she said. “The fatter a bear is, the healthier that bear is.”
Fat Bear Week started in 2014 as a one-day celebration. The bears have since become internet celebrities, drawing fans from around the world — last year, more than 1.7 million people voted. This year’s contest will feature even more bears, to highlight the challenges mother bears face fattening up their families.
16 chubby contenders
Fat bears are successful bears because they need a lot of body fat to survive winter hibernation. The contest celebrates the pounds they pack on, with before and after photos showing how much their bellies have grown.
There are 16 chubby contenders this year, up from a dozen. And there’s another change. Past years featured a Fat Bear Junior bracket, with four cub contestants. This year, Bruce said the individual cubs were replaced with whole bear families.
Bruce said mothers with cubs have to work even harder to pack on weight.
“We can kind of show off how the mothers have to feed not only themselves but all of these other cubs with them too,” Bruce said.
Bruce said the animals can almost double their body weight during the season. Once, a bear was estimated to weigh 1,400 pounds, she said.
This year’s bears include some familiar snouts — like Chunk, last year’s weighty winner. Along with his great size, Chunk’s broken jaw makes him hard to miss. He’s one of the largest bears on the Brooks River, but for much of this summer his whereabouts were unknown.
A few of Chunk’s rotund rivals will be the offspring of former champions. Bear 903, known as Gully, is believed to be the son of Grazer, crowned the fattest bear in 2023 and 2024. Backpack, or number 89, is the offspring of 2019 champion Holly.
Surprisingly, Bruce doesn’t make predictions for Fat Bear Week. She said it’s hard to pick a favorite, but the subadults — bears between 3 and 5 years old — are the underdogs.
Relatable bears inspire resilience
Bruce has worked primarily at Katmai since 2019. She said watching the bears grow up is “really something incredible.” Bear 428, known as Studious, was a spring cub when Bruce started.
“She could give birth in the den this year. She's looking fat enough to do that. Seeing the bears grow up is really something incredible,” Bruce said.
Bruce, who is originally from Maryland, said working at Katmai National Park and Preserve has changed her perspective on conservation and preservation. The park is on the Alaska Peninsula, which is estimated to have more bears than people, according to NPS.
“Growing up on the East Coast, it felt like we weren't necessarily integrated into the ecosystems around us, and you had to seek out those sorts of places to really confer with nature,” Bruce said. “That is just a part of the lifeways up here in Alaska”.
Longtime fat bear enthusiast Landin Norman is an administrator of a Facebook group with more than 20,000 fans of the tubby tournament. The animals’ stories captivate voters, he said.
“I think the story of moms that have to overcome the odds where they have multiple kids, or maybe they lose a cub in the spring and how they bounce back and recover – I think that people typically will relate that to things that are going on in their normal life, and can kind of find some inspiration from their resiliency of the bears,” Norman said.
Recently, a friend asked Norman which bear he would be, if he had to choose. He chose Gully, for his relaxed demeanor. But his 3-year-old daughter is more like Grazer, he said.
“She's very nurturing, but if you were to test her, she would handle it,” he said.
Norman, who works as a pastor in northwest Arkansas, said Fat Bear Week offers a reprieve from the everyday stressors of life. There’s no division, he said, just fat bears.
“I love just the community aspect of it,” he said. “I love being able to make new friends.”
