Fat Bear Week Is Bigger Than the Bears

Each year at Brooks Falls, a remote waterfall in southwestern Alaska, the who’s who of bears in Katmai National Park gather to prepare for winter. Whether they’re tussling over the prime feeding spot or eating 42 salmon in one sitting, the bears’ every move is recorded and live-streamed across the world to fans who know them by name and are gearing up to rank them on their girth.

Welcome to the eighth annual Fat Bear Week, a March Madness–style bracket hosted by Katmai National Park. What started as a poll with fewer than 2,000 votes in 2014 has become a viral sensation on Twitter and YouTube, with nearly 793,000 votes cast last year to crown Otis as the biggest bear of them all. Katmai’s goal this year is to get one million.

Although the video feed regularly shows bears shredding live salmon and fighting each other, followers of Fat Bear Week make up a mostly wholesome corner of the internet. Hundreds of thousands of people engage as a break from whatever horrible news alerts are being pushed out that day. What question could possibly be more fun to answer than which bear is the fattest?

The bracket shows each bear’s before and after pictures, taken in June or July and then in mid September, and they look like two totally different creatures; they’ve worked hard, gorging themselves on salmon at around 4,500 calories per sitting. (The National Park Service’s fun slider further illustrates the transformation.) While casual participants will vote on the bears’ heftiness after scrolling through the photos, the true Fat Bear Week stans live on the live stream. When it zooms out to show all the bears seemingly just hanging out, the footage is uniquely charming and transfixing—a slightly more violent version of the aquarium videos you might see in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. The comment section is lively, filled with viewers who can recognize each bear at a glance. (I saw a few of them wonder whether the people who saw the “after” photos without watching the live stream would vote differently than those who had observed the bears and their rolls in real time.) “There are people in this community that know the bears more than some of the rangers do,” interpretive park ranger Keith Moore says.

Indeed, what any time with the live stream will reveal is that each bear is more than the pounds they pack on. In that spirit, let’s not just judge them purely on their looks but also on their distinct personalities. The favorites are mostly identified by a number and name. There’s Otis (480), a four-time Fat Bear Week champ who some believe is past his zaftig prime thanks to old age and a few missing canines. (However, as evidenced by the video “Otis Eats 42 Salmon” from August, he’s still an expert fisher-bear.) Explore.org calls Chunk (32) one of “the river’s largest and most dominant males.” Moore describes Grazer (128) as “one of those bears that has her spot, and when she shows up, other bears leave.” There’s 747, whose number handily evokes the massive Boeing airplane, negating the need for a nickname. (747 just won his first round yesterday in the first day of competition.) In 2019, Holly (435) became the first bear other than Otis or the out-of-competition Beadnose (409) to win the title. Moore’s personal favorite is the underdog: a year-old cub identified only as 909’s yearling. From what I gather, she’s a rookie with a promising career ahead of her.

To me, the most fascinating bear of Fat Bear Week 2022 is the bad boy, 856, who was defeated by 747 in the first round of competition. His physical demeanor is so intimidating to other bears that his only real competitor for the best fishing spots is 747. While watching the live stream, I saw a few comments about 856’s bad rap. There’s also an ominously titled video, “The Reign of 856,” that shows him routinely bullying other bears. Moore explains that 856 is less popular because he has killed cubs in the past, first in 2011 and then again in 2018. “[These incidents], combined with his dominance and assertiveness, have led to his bad reputation. I have heard many people describe him as mean, evil, and a cub killer,” Moore says. “The truth is 856 is a wild bear doing wild-bear things. There are no morals in the bear world. We try not to anthropomorphize too much for those exact reasons.” No bear is as cuddly as it seems. Still, 856 may be the most aggressive, but that does not make him the fattest.

This brings up another question about Fat Bear Week: Is it okay to vote for a bear not based on their size but just because you’re a stan? “I think everybody votes differently based on their belief system,” Moore says. “Some people get super hardcore, and I’ve seen debates online about, Well, look at this bear’s stomach roll, its leg rolls. These bears are clearly fatter. And then there are some people who are just Team 480 Otis or Team 747.” Lest you protest that that approach goes against the spirit of Fat Bear Week, remember that we’re talking about large Ursidae here.

Fat Bear Week has proven an effective way to get people across the world interested, however briefly, in the ecosystem that allows the bears in Alaska to balloon each year. “A fat bear is a fit bear or a healthy bear, in our opinion,” Moore says. “Sometimes I think we can get a little too distracted with the appearance of the bears and have too much fun with that, whereas we might not be paying attention to how important it is that these salmon populations that we have here stay intact.” Moore explains that as the climate changes, the conditions in the river might become uninhabitable for the fish. “Because salmon are such fragile species, those changes in water quality can ultimately lead to a decline in their population,” he says. That, in turn, would lead to thinner bears that might not make it through the winter.

Lesson learned: There’s more to Fat Bear Week than just the massive mammals. Still, voting is now open. Should you need additional information to pick your bear, I wholly endorse watching the live stream of the bears and reading the commentary. You’ll learn plenty.