It’s Time to Vote For Your Favorite Fatso

The Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska has been especially thick with sockeye salmon this year, which is good news for the park’s brown bears fattening up before the winter hibernation. Contestants in Katmai’s annual Fat Bear Week barely have to move to feast on the fish on their way to their spawning ground.

“The river was wall to wall salmon for like, six weeks,” park ranger Mike Fitz tells National Geographic. “They didn't need to compete for spots at Brooks Falls. They could spread out throughout the river and basically pick up fish anytime that they wanted to.”

The bears are going head to head in the National Park Service’s Fat Bear Week, an online competition launched in 2014 in which bear fans cast votes for the specimen who “best exemplifies fatness and success in brown bears.” That year a few thousand voters participated; last year 1.2 million cast ballots for their favorite fatties.

Almost all rivers in Katmai are byways for the salmon, but the Brooks has a 6-foot-high waterfall at its halfway point, a natural dam that forces the fish to “school up” before making the leap over the falls to their spawning ground. A lot of them don’t make it, and instead end up on the bears’ all-you-can-eat menu.

The contest works like a single-elimation sports tournament, complete with a bracket through which voters can cast ballots for their champion. The bears are identified by numbers – 909 or 26, e.g. – but of course they usually get nicknames too, such as Chunk or Grazer. Some of these zaftig competitors will weigh more than a thousand pounds when it’s over (and then lose a third of that weight during the long winter’s sleep).

What’s it all for? “I think Fat Bear Week resonates with so many people because it’s a celebration of the success of wild animals,” says Fitz. “It's a showcase of a healthy ecosystem. And those are things worth celebrating,”

Witness the spectacle here. Voting closes on September 30.

Photo credit:Katmai Conservancy