Fat Bear Week: Chunk, the heavyweight bear with a damaged jaw, lastly wins | EUROtoday

A towering brown bear named Chunk, distinctive for his damaged jaw, has lastly clinched victory within the common Fat Bear Week contest, marking his first win after three consecutive years of narrowly lacking out in second place.

The annual on-line competitors invitations the general public to look at 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve via reside webcams. Viewers solid ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination match that spans every week.

Officially often known as Bear 32, Chunk triumphed over Bear 856 within the closing bracket, based on totals on the organisers’ web site. Contest organisers estimated Chunk’s spectacular weight at 1,200 kilos, not weighing particular person bears immediately because of security considerations.

The bears can acquire as much as 4 kilos (1.8 kilograms) per day throughout their summer time feeding interval. Mike Fitz, a naturalist for discover.org, commented: “Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River.”

Fitz steered the damage probably got here from a struggle with one other bear.

The contest is wildly common. This 12 months it attracted greater than 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 (483 kilometers) from Anchorage.

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It is the biggest glut of salmon within the dwelling recollections of the bears or the people who’ve been operating the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014, based on Katmai Conservancy spokesperson Naomi Boak.

That abundance “decreased conflict in the river since salmon were readily available,” Boak mentioned in an e-mail. In Tuesday’s announcement, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated round 200,000 salmon made their approach up Brooks River.

In leaner years, the hardest bears jockey for the very best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, the place the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they struggle their approach 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 Explore.org reside cameras confirmed two individuals calmly casting fishing rods alongside the river whilst brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.

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Voters within the on-line contest might overview earlier than and after photographs of the bears, lean firstly of summer time and fattened on the finish.

The bears are usually not truly weighed — that may be too harmful and tough — and a few followers select their favorite 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.

Fat 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.