Fat Bear Week is here early, and the bears are fat and playful

Fat Bear Week, when people get to pick their favorite Alaskan brown bear bulking up for hibernation, is coming early this year. The annual online competition that normally starts in early October will instead start on Sept. 23. Katmai National Park and Preserve officials say the bears are magnificently plump ahead of the tournament.

“This year’s salmon run was extraordinary, with salmon numbers surpassing anything seen in recent memory,” Matt Johnson, the park’s interpretation program manager, told NPR via email. “As a result, the brown bears of Katmai are well-nourished and looking for other things to do besides scrap[p]ing with each other for food.”

The bracket for Fat Bear Week 2025 will be revealed on Sept. 22, when fans will see where familiar names of past champions, such as 128 Grazer, 480 Otis and 747— aka Bear Force One, estimated to weigh a whopping 1,400 pounds — stack up against new challengers. The single-elimination tournament starts on Sept. 23 and runs through Sept. 30, when a new champion will emerge. Fat Bear Junior, for bear cubs, started on Thursday.

Organizers expect votes to come from across the planet.

“Over one million votes were cast for the bears in 2024 from one hundred countries,” the park said as it announced this year’s dates.

The brown bears of Katmai occupy the rarest strata of celebrity: captivating and oblivious, thanks to the “bearcams” that beam their activities in the scenic Brooks Falls and other areas to online viewers around the world.

The abundance of salmon in Katmai National Park and Bristol Bay in southern Alaska is contributing to a drop in conflict among the bears this year compared to the 2024 competition, which was delayed when one large bear killed another. Voters then propelled Grazer to a landslide win over the massive 32 Chunk, a bear that, months earlier, had killed one of Grazer’s cubs.

“This year there was less congregating at Brooks Falls, less fighting, and — astonishingly — noticeably more playtime with each other,” Johnson said.

Chunk brings a compelling storyline to this year’s competition. This summer, he arrived at the river with a broken jaw and other wounds that are believed to be the result of a fight, according to Explore.org, which operates webcams in the park. Since then, he’s been seen fishing and adapting to his injury — “and even playing gently with younger bears like 503,” the Katmai Conservancy stated, as it celebrated the bear’s resiliency.

“Still here. Still fishing. Still Chunk,” the group said.

Fat Bear Week started in 2014 as a way for the general public and students to learn more about brown bears, sockeye salmon and the vibrant ecosystem they share. Viewers watch as bears that emerged in the spring looking gaunt and bony enter a condition called hyperphagia, which stokes a relentless hunger to eat so they can pack on fat they’ll need to survive another winter.

By the time fall arrives, large males routinely surpass 1,000 pounds, according to the Katmai website.

“There are anywhere between 80-100 bears that return to the Brooks River every year,” Sarah Bruce, media team lead at the national park, told NPR. Most of them learned to fish the river as cubs alongside their mother bears, she said. Only 12 of them are featured in the annual Fat Bear Week competition.

Overall, Katmai National Park and Preserve has an estimated 2,200 bears within its boundaries, Bruce said.