Anchorage, Alaska (AP) – Chunk, a towering brown bear with a broken jaw, wiped out the competition Tuesday at the popular Fat Bear Week contest.
The annual online competition allows viewers to chase 12 bears in Katomai National Park, Alaska, save live webcams and cast votes in bracket-style single elimination tournaments that continue into the week. According to the totals posted on the organizer’s website, the chunks officially known as the Bear 32, which do not have a nickname for the final bracket, are known as the Bear 32.
Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 pounds by the contest organizers. Although individual bears do not weigh during the contest due to safety concerns, Chunk and others have scanned the density in the past to enhance weight estimates using a laser technology called Lidar.
“Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest bad bears on the Brooks River,” said Mike Fitz, a naturalist at Explore.org. Fitz said it’s likely that Chunk will hurt his jaw in a fight with another bear.
The contests are very popular. This year, it attracted over 1.5 million votes from fans who saw Urshin’s canyon on a record-breaking salmon run in autumn fishing on the Brooks River, about 300 miles (483 kilometres) from Anchorage.
According to Naomi Boak, a spokesman for Katmai Conservancy, it is the biggest salmon tycoon in the living memories of bears or humans, who have been running the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014.
Its abundance “reduced river conflicts because salmon is readily available,” Bork said in an email. In a announcement Tuesday, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated that around 200,000 salmon had climbed the Brooks River.
The toughest Bears Jockey for the best fishing spots in Brooks Falls in the year. There, the salmon converges on the bottleneck and jumps out of the water to lay eggs.
This year, fishing spots in Brooks Falls were often empty as bears hunted up and down. There was even room for humans to fish. At one point on Monday, one of the live cameras on Explore.org showed the two were calmly throwing fishing lines along the river, even as brown bears fell upstream and downstream from them.
Online contest voters reviewed before and after Bears photos, tilted towards the beginning of the summer and finally fattened. Bears don’t really weigh on them – it would be too dangerous and difficult – and some fans will choose their favorites based on their looks and backstory.
Brooks Falls live camera captured the moment in 2024 for Mother Bear 128 Glaser “It slid down the waterfall and floated into a fishing spot occupied by Chunk, attacking and injuring the turnip. Glaser fought Chunk, but the Cub eventually died.. After a dramatic battle, voting fans handed Glaser the victory over Chunk.
Fat Bear Week was launched in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about the brown bear, the coastal cousin of the Grizzlies. They catch and eat as much salmon as possible in the summer, allowing them to fatten the cold, lean winter hibernation of Alaska.
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Atanacio was reported from Seattle.
