A towering brown bear named Chunk, distinctive for his broken jaw, has finally clinched victory in the popular Fat Bear Week contest, marking his first win after three consecutive years of narrowly missing out in second place.
The annual online competition invites the public to observe 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve through live webcams. Viewers cast ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament that spans a week.
Officially known as Bear 32, Chunk triumphed over Bear 856 in the final bracket, according to totals on the organisers’ website. Contest organisers estimated Chunk’s impressive weight at 1,200 pounds, not weighing individual bears directly due to safety concerns.
The bears can gain up to four pounds (1.8 kilograms) per day during their summer feeding period. Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org, commented: “Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River.”
Fitz suggested the injury likely came from a fight with another bear.
The contest is wildly popular. This year it attracted more than 1.5 million votes from fans who watched the ursines gorge on a record run of fall salmon as they fished in the Brooks River about 300 miles (483 kilometers) from Anchorage.
It is the largest glut of salmon in the living memories of the bears or the humans who have been running the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014, according to Katmai Conservancy spokesperson Naomi Boak.
That abundance “decreased conflict in the river since salmon were readily available,” Boak said in an email. In Tuesday’s announcement, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated around 200,000 salmon made their way up Brooks River.
In leaner years, the toughest bears jockey for the best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, where the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they fight their way upstream to spawn.
This year, Brooks Falls fishing spots were often empty as bears hunted up and down stream. There was even room for humans to fish.
At one point Monday, one of the Explore.org live cameras showed two people calmly casting fishing rods along the river even as brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.
Voters in the online contest could review before and after photos of the bears, lean at the start of summer and fattened at the end.
The bears are not actually weighed — that would be too dangerous and difficult — and some fans choose their favourite based on looks or backstory.
The live cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments in 2024 when mother bear 128 Grazer’s cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub.
Grazer fought Chunk, but the cub ultimately died. After the dramatic fight, voting fans handed Grazer a victory over Chunk.
Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies. They spend summers catching and eating as many salmon as possible so they can fatten up for hibernation in Alaska’s cold, lean winters.
