Chunk, a bear of 1,200 pounds with a broken jaw, won the Alaska Fat Bear Week competition

Chunk, an imposing brown bear with a broken jaw, swept the competition on Tuesday in the popular competition of the Fat Bear Week – its first victory after having finished closely in second place three previous years.

The annual online competition allows viewers to follow 12 bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska and keep on live webcams and make voting ballots in a net and elimination tournament that lasts a week. Chunk – officially known as Bear 32 – Battu Bear 856, which has no nickname, in the final tranche, according to totals published on the organizers’ website.

Chunk’s weight was estimated at 1,200 pounds by competition organizers. Although they do not weigh individual bears during the competition due to security problems, Chunk and others have scan their density to strengthen weight estimates in the past using laser technology called Lidar.

“Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest bears in Brooks River,” said Mike Fitz, naturalist to explore.org. Fitz said Chunk probably injured his jaw in a fight with another bear.

The competition is extremely popular. This year, he attracted more than 1.5 million votes of fans who watched the Ursines gorges on a record of autumn salmon while they were fishing in the Brooks river about 483 kilometers of anchorage.

This is the greatest overabundance of salmon in the living memories of the Bears or humans who have been organizing the Fat Bear Week competition since 2014, according to the spokesperson for Katmai Conservancy, Naomi Boak.

This abundance “reduced conflicts in the river because the salmon was easily available,” said Boak in an email. In Tuesday’s announcement, the Katmai National Park Forestry, Sarah Bruce, estimated that around 200,000 salmon made the way to Brooks River.

During the thinner years, the harsher bears jockey for the best Brooks Falls fishing sites, where the salmon converges in a bottleneck and jumps water while they are fighting upstream to appear.

This year, the Brooks Falls fishing places were often empty while bears fell from top to bottom. There was even room for humans to fish. At one point on Monday, one of the living cameras Explore.org showed two people calmly throwing fishing canes along the river while brown bears were upstream and downstream.

Voters of the online competition could review before and after the photos of the Bears, leaning at the beginning of the summer and fattened at the end. The bears are not really weighed – it would be too dangerous and difficult – and some fans choose their favorite according to the appearance or the background.

The living cameras of Brooks Falls captured the moments in 2024 when Mother Bear 128 Grazer’s Cub slipped on the waterfall and floated in the fishing site occupied by a piece, which attacked and injured the CUB. Grazer fought, but the Cub is finally dead. After the dramatic fight, voting fans presented Grazer a victory over Chunk.

The Fat Bear Week was launched in 2014 as an interactive means of informing the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins ​​of the Grizzlies. They spend summers to catch and eat as much salmon as possible so that they can fatten hibernation in the cold and lean winters of Alaska.