On Wednesday, Fat Bear Week will be opening their online voting booths for two matches between the fattest bears of the week. The annual showdown includes 12 competitors: brown bears who bulk up for hibernation by feasting on spawning sockeye salmon in the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, where about 2,200 brown bears live. The competition allows voters to watch the bears transform from scrawny, lean bears into fat beasts as they prepare for winter.
“There’s no real set criteria that you’re supposed to vote on,” said Mike Fitz, who started the competition in 2014. “You could vote on just simply the largest bear, or look at relative fatness or consider the extenuating circumstances of each bear’s life like the challenges of raising offspring.”
The competition runs from October 5 to October 11, though it takes place on different dates every year. Voters can access the competition’s website to vote during those days from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time. Participants can then decide who gets to “advance” to the next round.
Fat Bear Week, which has the primary purpose of promoting wildlife conservation efforts, has grown in popularity since its initial introduction in 2014. In 2021, the event drew nearly 800,000 online participants, compared to a couple thousand votes in its first year. Fitz started the competition while working as a ranger at Katmai National Park, and grew the event from a single day to an entire week after seeing how well it fared.
Fat Bear Junior, the event’s spin off, features the park's chubbiest cubs. This year the event ran from September 29 to September 30, with a female yearling cub named “909’s cub” being crowned as this year’s champion. A before photo taken in June of this year and an after photo taken just last month of the young female cub shows her incredible transformation from an emaciated looking cub to a bushy, rotund beast.
On average, most male adult brown bears pack on the pounds between the middle of summer to late fall, with large adult bears typically weighing 600 to 900 lbs in mid-summer and well over 1,000 lbs by November. Adult females weigh about ⅓ less than adult males, according to NPS.