The chunkiest of chunks face off in Alaska’s Fat Bear Week

An Alaska nationwide park’s yearly celebration of the beefy, brown and bristly is getting underway as a few of the chunkiest bears on the planet fatten up for his or her lengthy winter slumber.

Fats Bear Week doesn’t formally begin at Katmai Nationwide Park and Protect till Oct. 2, when followers can start voting on-line for his or her favourite ursine behemoths in tournament-style brackets.

However on Tuesday organizers revealed the 4 cub contestants on this week’s Fats Bear Jr. contest — with the “chubby champ charging on to face the corpulent competitors” within the grownup bracket, as Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy put it in the course of the livestreamed announcement.

The annual contest, which drew greater than 1.3 million votes final 12 months, is technique to have fun the resiliency of the two,200 brown bears that dwell within the protect on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest nook towards the Aleutian Islands. Probably the most devoted followers watch the bears on dwell cameras at discover.org all summer season lengthy as they feast on sockeye salmon returning to the Brooks River.

This 12 months’s contestants for Fats Bear Jr. embrace some acquainted muzzles: Each the 2022 and 2023 junior champs are up for a repeat; they continue to be eligible as a result of they nonetheless meet the factors for being thought-about a cub, together with remaining with a sow. Most cubs stick with their mom for about 2 1/2 years, however the 2022 Fats Bear Jr. winner, referred to as 909 Jr., who has remained with an aunt, is sort of 4 years previous.

There’s additionally an emotional favourite: a spring cub of Grazer, final 12 months’s Fats Bear champ. The cub’s sibling died this summer season after it slipped over a small waterfall on the Brooks River and was killed by a dominant grownup male referred to as Chunk, or Bear 32 — an assault captured on the bear cams. Grazer fought Chunk in an effort to avoid wasting the cub, but it surely later died.

Grownup male brown bears usually weigh 600 to 900 kilos (about 270 to 410 kilograms) in mid-summer. By the point they’re able to hibernate after feasting on migrating and spawning salmon — every eats as many as 30 fish per day — giant males can weigh properly over 1,000 kilos (454 kilograms). Females are about one-third smaller.

The grownup contestants for the Fats Bear Week match can be introduced Sept. 30, with voting going down Oct. 2-8.