One of the ursine elders of Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska is now a four-time champion of chunk.
Otis, a brown bear estimated to be 24 to 26 years old, was crowned on Tuesday as the winner of Katmai’s annual Fat Bear Week. He came out on top in an online competition pitting 12 large, salmon-chomping bears against one another.
Otis wound up besting the other finalist, a chocolate-brown male known as Walker, in the final round of voting.
Photo: Reuters
“The portly patriarch of paunch persevered to pulverize the Baron of Beardonkadonk,” the park said in its Twitter announcement.
Fat Bear Week, a joint project of the park and its nonprofit partners, the Katmai Conservancy and the media organization explore.org, has become an Internet sensation.
Wildlife fans submitted votes in a playoff-style competition featuring photographs and video of the bears feasting at a waterfall site on the salmon-rich Brooks River. Explore.org’s “bear cam” captured live footage of the bear action at Brooks Falls.
Otis, thanks to his longevity, is a Fat Bear institution.
First documented at the falls in 2001, Otis was the inaugural Fat Bear champion, winning in 2014 when the event was held on a single day. He also took the 2016 and 2017 titles. The Katmai Conservancy has named a fundraising project after him; last year, the Otis Fund raised more than US$230,000 for Katmai research, education and bear-protection projects.
In his old age, Otis can no longer compete with the younger and stronger bears for prime fishing spots, according to park officials. Two of his canine teeth are missing, and the others are worn.
But when it comes to salmon, Otis is deceptively canny, according to explore.org’s Web site.
“While Otis occasionally appears to be napping or not paying attention, most of the time he’s focused on the water, and he experiences a relatively high salmon catch as a result,” the Web site says.
Katmai sprawls over four million acres on the Alaska Peninsula in the southwestern part of the state. The park is home to about 2,200 brown bears that can grow to 1,000 pounds or more. The bears are fattened by salmon swimming in from Bristol Bay, site of the world’s biggest salmon runs.
The bears need their girth because they can lose a third of their weight during their winter hibernation, park officials said.
Even with Fat Bear Week over, park officials said on Twitter that Otis “is still chowing down.”
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built
RSS