By CEDAR ATTANASIO and MARK THIESSEN with AP
Published on
Chunk, a towering brown bear with a broken jaw, swept the competition Tuesday in the popular Fat Bear Week contest — his first win after narrowly finishing in second place three previous years.
The annual online competition allows viewers to follow 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve on live webcams and cast ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament that lasts a week. Chunk, known officially as Bear 32, beat out Bear 856, who doesn’t have a nickname, in the final bracket, according to totals posted on the organisers’ website.
Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 pounds (nearly 550 kilograms) by contest organisers. While they do not weigh individual bears during the contest due to safety concerns, Chunk and others have had their density scanned in the past to bolster weight estimates using laser technology called LIDAR.
“Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River,” said Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org. Fitz said Chunk likely hurt his jaw in a fight with another bear.
The largest glut of salmon in living memory
The contest is wildly popular. This year, it attracted over 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 480 kilometres 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.
Dramatic fights and emotional backstories
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, as that would be too dangerous and difficult. 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.