meet the contenders and cast your vote…
The fats bears have landed.
Fat Bear Week — a bracket-style, single-elimination match where 16 brown bears in Alaska’s Brooks River will compete to be this yr’s fattest bear — kicks off tomorrow, with voting open to the public on September 22 and concluding on September 29, when the chubby champion will likely be topped.
The contest falls on the first day of fall and celebrates the weight put on by bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park in preparation for winter hibernation.
This yr’s contestant lineup options 5 bear households, two subadults, 4 single grownup females and 5 grownup males — the latter class including 32 Chunk, last yr’s reigning winner who weighed in at over 1,200 kilos and took the title with a damaged jaw.
Bear 32 Chunk received the 2025 Fat Bear Week contest. T. Carmack/Katmai National Park
The bears return to the Brook River every June for the salmon migration, where they fatten up for the winter, according to Popular Science.
The contest, where voters choose each bear’s before-and-after pictures from late spring to early fall based on how efficiently they bulked up over the summer time, has grow to be an online sensation, rendering over a million votes from over 100 nations last yr, according to a number of media retailers.
Still, it began as a lark — created by former Katmai National Park ranger Mike Fitz and his staff as a day-long Facebook ballot, after Fitz was shocked to see side-by-side bearcam photos of an animal’s surprising weight transformation from early summer time to late summer time.
1,700 voters participated, with the quantity steadily growing each yr.
A bracket reveal with bears is shown for the 2026 Fat Bear Week. Sara Wolman/Explore
“I thought it would be a goofy thing for the rangers,” Fitz told First Alert 4 last yr when talking about the contest’s origins. “It still is.”
These days, voters are inspired to take into account each bear’s life story, with Katmai ranger Sarah Bruce admitting during a latest video asserting the contestants that Fat Bear Week voting is ” very subjective.”
“So many different things can make a bear worthy of the vote,” said Bruce in the vid.
Before and after pictures of the bears help voters decide the final winner of the contest. Courtesy of explore.org
While the Fat Bear Week winner doesn’t get an official prize, bear lovers can help the animals by donating to Katmai Conservancy’s Otis Fund, named after Bear 480, the champ of the contest for 4 titles (non-consecutive) before he died in 2024.
Donations made between September 22 and October 3 will likely be matched by explore.org, which exhibits a livestream of the bears.
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