Fat bear week kicks off its 12th year — meet the contenders

The fat bears have landed.

Fat Bear Week — a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament where 16 brown bears in Alaska’s Brooks River will compete to be this year’s fattest bear  — kicks off tomorrow, with voting open to the public on September 22 and concluding on September 29, when the chubby champion will be crowned.

The contest falls on the first day of fall and celebrates the weight put on by bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park in preparation for winter hibernation.

This year’s contestant lineup features five bear families, two subadults, four single adult females and five adult males — the latter category including 32 Chunk, last year’s reigning winner who weighed in at over 1,200 pounds and took the title with a broken jaw.

The bears return to the Brook River every June for the salmon migration, where they fatten up for the winter, according to Popular Science.

The contest, where voters judge each bear’s before-and-after shots from late spring to early fall based on how successfully they bulked up over the summer, has become an online sensation, rendering over a million votes from over 100 countries last year, according to multiple media outlets.

Still, it started as a lark — created by former Katmai National Park ranger Mike Fitz and his team as a day-long Facebook poll, after Fitz was shocked to see side-by-side bearcam images of an animal’s shocking weight transformation from early summer to late summer.

1,700 voters participated, with the number steadily growing each year.

“I thought it would be a goofy thing for the rangers,” Fitz told First Alert 4 last year when speaking about the contest’s origins. “It still is.”

These days, voters are encouraged to consider each bear’s life story, with Katmai ranger Sarah Bruce admitting during a recent video announcing the contestants that Fat Bear Week voting is ” very subjective.”

“So many different things can make a bear worthy of the vote,” said Bruce in the vid.

While the Fat Bear Week winner does not get an official prize, bear lovers can support the animals by donating to Katmai Conservancy’s Otis Fund, named after Bear 480, the champ of the contest for four titles (non-consecutive) before he died in 2024.

Donations made between September 22 and October 3 will be matched by explore.org, which shows a livestream of the bears.