Fattest bears in Alaska want your vote
National park holds online competition to educate about wildlife
Like a rite of fall, Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska celebrates its fattest brown bears.
The park holds Fat Bear Week, an online competition that highlights how intensely the bears eat, stuffing themselves with sockeye salmon at the Brooks River to gain weight for winter hibernation.
The event began as Fat Bear Tuesday in 2014 and expanded into a weeklong contest a year later to raise awareness about the wildlife in the park and preserve, the home to about 2,200 brown bears.
“People love bears and they love a good competition,” said Amber Kraft, a spokeswoman for the park, which stretches about 4.1 million acres southwest of Anchorage. “This year, in particular, Fat Bear Week is a nice break from everything else going on,” she added.
Last year’s contest drew more than 200,000 votes, Kraft said. This year’s tournament began on Sept. 30 and runs through Tuesday and features 12 contestants. May the plumpest bear win.
How to play
Park rangers have created a March Madness-like game out of the contest by pitting pairs of bears against each other — for votes — and asking the public to choose their favorite heavyweights. This year, to allow more people to take part, voting moved off Facebook and onto a website hosted by explore.org, a network that includes more than 150 live nature webcams.
The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. (The losers can, well, go back to eating.)
The finals take place Tuesday, when one bear will be crowned the big champ. What does the bear win? A moment of social media fame, also the likelihood of surviving winter.
To show the bears’ drastic weight gains, the park shows photos of them before and after they began packing on the pounds this summer.
Each summer, park staff usually identify about 40 bears along the Brooks River, Kraft said, adding that only brown bears regularly inhabit the park. “Taxonomists currently consider brown bears and grizzly bears to be the same species,” she said, distinguished mainly by brown bears’ access to coastal food and grizzlies’ inland habitat.
Bears and their admirers
Park staff members assign the bears numbered names, like 480 Otis, so that they can identify and monitor them, and some of the most frequently seen bears get nicknames, too. Each year, the officials detail biographies for the bears, listing their age, gender and offspring, and they set up a live webcam that shows the bears fishing (and entertains people online).
On social media, the bears have fans who root for them as they go about their bear lives. Using the hashtag #fatbearweek, some superfans have even dressed up as their preferred bear. One such fan, Kimberly Daggerhart of Asheville, N.C., wore a bear costume for Halloween last year to celebrate 435 Holly, the season’s winner.
“She is large and in charge and she seems to be a great mom to her cubs,” said Daggerhart, 35. “I think this contest is so popular because it’s one of the few remaining wholesome events we can all participate in. It’s fun to cheer for these bears!”