College basketball has March Madness. Alaska has Fat Bear Week.
In the latest edition of what has proved to be a wildly popular annual contest that honors feeding season at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, the bracket for Fat Bear Week was released on Monday, and voting began at noon Eastern on Tuesday.
The contest was created in 2014 as a small, one-day affair, with the goal of drawing attention to the bears and to the importance of having a place for them to thrive. Eleven years later it is a marquee event, with more than one million votes cast in each of the last three years.
Viewers around the world tune in to watch a livestream of brown bears feeding at Brooks Falls, a salmon run in the park, in preparation for winter hibernation. Then, using a sports-inspired bracket, they vote which bear they believe is the fattest of them all, until a winner is declared. There’s also a Fat Bear Week Junior, in which younger bears competed. The winner of that contest, an offspring of the two-time champion Grazer, got a spot in the main bracket with the big boys.
And girls. Fat Bear Week is open to any and all peninsular grizzlies — there are about 2,200 in the park — so long as they are sufficiently chunky. An adult male Alaska brown bear can reach upward of 1,200 pounds, though exact weights of the bears in the contest are not provided. Over the summer, the bears gain hundreds of pounds, with some younger ones doubling their body weight gnawing on fish after fish.
Voting will continue through Sept. 30. The public can make selections between 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern time each day until the biggest, roundest, jiggliest bear is crowned the winner.
Mike Fitz, a former park ranger and resident naturalist at Explore.org, the media organization that helps host Fat Bear Week, said the initial idea came after one of the park’s followers on Facebook posted a side-by-side comparison of one bear’s weight gain over the course of the summer. Back then, the contest was just called Fat Bear Tuesday.
Last year, the bracket’s release was delayed after a fight between two grizzlies, which was caught on the livestream, left one bear dead. It was a blunt reminder that despite the cutesy popularity of Fat Bear Week, these bears are very real animals and getting enough to eat is critical to their survival.
Naomi Boak, a communication specialist for the Katmai Conservancy who has been a producer for the event for several years, described watching the annual livestream as addictive and likened it to a soap opera with each bear playing out its own role in the melodrama that is the great outdoors.
In 2019, Ms. Boak, who was born and raised in New York City, got hooked on watching the giant, fuzzy eating machines on her computer and took a job working in the park. She ditched her apartment in the Sugar Hill neighborhood in Harlem and moved to Alaska, where she worked for four seasons.
“It’s an opportunity to connect with nature even if you’re living in the Bronx,” Ms. Boak, who is 73 and now lives in New Bedford, Mass., said of watching the bears online. Her personal favorite, 89 Backpack, did not make the cut for this year’s contest.
The team behind the event starts the selection process early, debating over potential contestants and considering qualities like age, size and sex, Mr. Fitz said. Team members try to find a wide range of entrants to make the competition more interesting.
“We hope that the bracket enables us to tell the stories of the different bears successes,” Ms. Boak said. “We want fat bears. At the end of the season, that’s how they survive hibernation.”
Put more simply: Fat bears are healthy bears.
One challenge of the event, Ms. Boak said, is that each contestant in the bracket needs two photos: one taken at the end of the season — when bears are at their fattest — and one from before a summer spent bulking up and furiously eating. “You’re really out there trying to get those pictures all the time,” Ms Boak said.
Like any good soap opera, it’s also about the narrative arc.
“I think Chunk is deserving of the vote,” Mr. Fitz said of last year’s runner-up, who is a contestant again this year. Chunk arrived at the river in June with a broken jaw, which could have put him out of the running, and even in mortal danger. But Chunk persevered through the pain and showed his “adaptability,” Mr. Fitz said. “Chunk certainly was resilient in his efforts to get fat this year,” he added.
Mr. Fitz was hesitant to discount any of the bears’ chances, though.
“The week always throws out a bunch of surprises, and that’s one of the things that makes it fun,” he said.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
The post The Bears Are Back and They’re Fatter Than Ever appeared first on New York Times.
