Chunk, a towering brown bear with a broken jaw, on Tuesday swept the competition in the Fat Bear Week contest — his first win after narrowly finishing second in three previous years.
The annual online competition allows viewers to follow 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve on live webcams and cast ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament that lasts a week.
Chunk — known officially as Bear 32 — beat Bear 856, who does not have a nickname, in the final bracket, totals posted on the organizers’ Web site showed.
Photo: AP
Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 pounds (544kg) by contest organizers.
While they do not weigh individual bears during the contest because of safety concerns, Chunk and others have had their density scanned to bolster weight estimates using laser technology called LIDAR.
“Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River,” said Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org.
Fitz said that Chunk likely hurt his jaw in a fight with another bear.
The contest is wildly popular. This year it attracted more than 1.5 million votes from people who watched the ursines gorge on a record run of fall salmon as they fished in the Brooks River about 483km from Anchorage.
It is the largest glut of salmon in the living memories of the bears or the humans who have been running the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014, Katmai Conservancy spokeswoman Naomi Boak said.
That abundance “decreased conflict in the river, since salmon were readily available,” Boak said in an e-mail.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated that about 200,000 salmon made their way up Brooks River.
In leaner years, the toughest bears jockey for the best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, where the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they fight their way upstream to spawn.
This year, Brooks Falls fishing spots were often empty as bears hunted up and down stream.
There was even room for humans to fish.
At one point on Monday, one of the Explore.org live cameras showed two people calmly casting fishing rods along the river even as brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.
Voters in the online contest could review before and after photographs of the bears, lean at the start of summer and fattened at the end.
Some fans choose their favorite based on looks or backstory.
The live cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments last year when mother bear 128 Grazer’s cub slipped over a waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub.
Grazer fought Chunk, but the cub ultimately died.
After the dramatic fight, voting fans handed Grazer a victory over Chunk.
Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies. They spend summers catching and eating as many salmon as possible so they can fatten up for hibernation in Alaska’s cold, lean winters.
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