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Chunk, a towering brown bear with a damaged jaw, swept the competitors Tuesday within the standard Fats Bear Week contest — his first win after narrowly ending in second place three earlier years.
The annual on-line competitors permits viewers to comply with 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai Nationwide Park and Protect on reside webcams and forged ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination event that lasts per week.
Chunk — recognized formally as Bear 32 — beat out Bear 856, who doesn’t have a nickname, within the ultimate bracket, in keeping with totals posted on the organizers’ web site.
Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 kilos by contest organizers.
Whereas they don’t weigh particular person bears throughout the contest due to security considerations, Chunk and others have had their density scanned to bolster weight estimates up to now utilizing laser expertise known as LIDAR.
“Regardless of his damaged jaw, he stays one of many greatest, baddest bears at Brooks River,” mentioned Mike Fitz, a naturalist for discover.org. Fitz mentioned Chunk doubtless damage his jaw in a struggle with one other bear.
The competition is wildly standard. This 12 months it attracted over 1.5 million votes from followers who watched the ursines gorge on a report run of fall salmon as they fished within the Brooks River about 300 miles from Anchorage.
It’s the largest glut of salmon within the dwelling reminiscences of the bears or the people who’ve been operating the Fats Bear Week contest since 2014, in keeping with Katmai Conservancy spokesperson Naomi Boak.
That abundance “decreased battle within the river since salmon have been available,” Boak mentioned in an electronic mail.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Katmai Nationwide Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated round 200,000 salmon made their means up Brooks River.
In leaner years, the hardest bears jockey for the most effective fishing spots at Brooks Falls, the place the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they struggle their means upstream to spawn.
This 12 months, Brooks Falls fishing spots have been typically empty as bears hunted up and down stream. There was even room for people to fish.
At one level Monday, one of many Discover.org reside cameras confirmed two individuals calmly casting fishing rods alongside the river at the same time as brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.
Voters within the on-line contest might assessment earlier than and after pictures of the bears, lean firstly of summer time and fattened on the finish.
The bears should not truly weighed — that might be too harmful and troublesome — and a few followers select their favourite based mostly on seems or backstory.
The reside cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments in 2024 when mom bear 128 Grazer ’s cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub.
Grazer fought Chunk, however the cub in the end died. After the dramatic struggle, voting followers handed Grazer a victory over Chunk.
Fats Bear Week was began in 2014 as an interactive solution to inform the general public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies.
They spend summers catching and consuming as many salmon as doable to allow them to fatten up for hibernation in Alaska’s chilly, lean winters.
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