Fat Bear Week opens for Alaska’s heavyweight crown. Can Chunk, the 1,200-pound champ, win again?

Filed 49m ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Winner Winner

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Matti Blume · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Voting opened for the 12th annual Fat Bear Week, in which Katmai National Park pits sixteen of its brown bears against each other in an online bracket judging who packed on the most weight before winter. Defending champion Chunk, estimated at over 1,200 pounds, faces competitors including Gully, offspring of two-time winner Grazer, with the public choosing winners from before-and-after photos rather than any actual scale.

The contest, run through explore.org's livestream and fatbearweek.org, is billed as a way to highlight the roughly 2,200 brown bears in the preserve and their salmon-driven survival strategy, with adult males sometimes eating 30 fish a day before losing a third of their body weight in hibernation. Voting concludes Sept. 29, with fans as likely to pick a bear for its backstory, including a 2024 incident in which Chunk fatally injured a rival's cub, as for its girth.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Nobody weighs the bears, which is either the most honest or the least honest part of the whole exercise, depending on how you feel about the internet deciding things by vibes. A contest about who ate the most salmon this year got settled the same way everything gets settled now, by a popularity vote and a good origin story. At least the bears don't know they're famous, which already puts them ahead of most contestants in this kind of thing.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Winner Winner · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

Read it scored.

Every story, every clown, every kazoo — in your pocket. Music plays automatically. Regret is optional.

GET IT ON iOS GET IT ON ANDROID

OR FOLLOW THE DESK ON BLUESKY →