Fat Bear Week has begun for the 12th time at Katmai national park, with the public set to decide which brown bear has best prepared for winter. It is a simple contest with a serious wildlife backdrop: the bears are building up fat reserves before hibernation, and this year’s event again puts the Brooks River salmon run at the centre of the story.
The tournament runs from 22 to 29 September, with fans voting after the park opened the annual Face Off-style contest on Monday. Last year’s competition drew more than 1.7m votes from 100 countries, underlining how a remote stretch of Alaska has turned into a global talking point.
Why the bears get so big
Fat Bear Week began in 2014 as Fat Bear Tuesday, but the idea has grown into one of the park’s biggest public events. The basic reason is straightforward: brown bears need to put on as much weight as possible before winter, and that means taking advantage of the salmon run when hundreds of thousands of fish return to Brooks River.
Mike Fitz, who has helped explain the event to a wider audience, said the appeal lies in following individual bears across the season and across years. Explore.org installed livestream cameras in Katmai national park in 2012, and that long-running access has helped viewers build a connection with the animals as their stories unfold.
“One of the things that makes the webcam experience really special is that we get to follow the stories of individual bears, so we know them across the season and years,” Fitz said. “And that helps us to form deeper connections with them and tell their stories about surviving in the wild.”
He also put the food chain at the heart of the event. “Every year, tens of millions of salmon return to this region,” Fitz said. “Without salmon, there would be no Fat Bear Week.”
That is why the competition is more than just a popularity contest. The salmon are the foundation of the ecosystem, and the bears are the most visible reminder of how tightly everything is connected. Fitz added that the bears are “amazing creatures in their own right” and called them “the keystone of the ecosystem.”
More cubs at Brooks Camp
Park superintendent Mark Sturm said this year’s bear season has brought another encouraging sign at Brooks Camp. “There are more cubs at Brooks Camp this year than have been seen in a long time,” he said.
That matters because a well-fed brown bear is more likely to carry cubs through the den and more likely to have a larger litter. As Fitz put it, “If you are a well-fed brown bear you are more likely to have cubs in the den and you’re also more likely to have a large litter.”
Last year’s winner, Bear 32, nicknamed Chunk, came out on top after the contest drew that huge international vote. This year, the same basic premise remains: pick the bear that best reflects the hard truth of life in the wild, where survival depends on getting fat at exactly the right time.
The appeal, as Fitz said, is also strangely human. “We see a lot of ourselves in brown bears,” he said. In a contest like this, that is the point. Fans are not just choosing a winner; they are watching a race against winter in one of the nation’s most remote national parks.
