Wide-bodied 747 crowned Alaska’s fattest bear

In Alaska’s annual battle of heavyweights, a salmon-chomping bruin named 747 – like the jetliner – has emerged as the most fabulously fat.

The bear, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, was victorious on Tuesday after a week of frenzied online voting in what has become an international sensation: Fat Bear Week.

Winner 747 was a worthy champion, the park said in a statement. “This year he really packed on the pounds, looking like he was fat enough to hibernate in July and yet continuing to eat until his belly seemed to drag along the ground by late September,” the park said. There couldn’t have been a more epic matchup than the championship face-off between two aptly named bears: 747 and Chunk, aka Bear 32. In the end, 747 pulled ahead with more than 47,300 votes compared to Chunk’s roughly 21,900 votes.

Fat Bear Week pits 12 bears against each other in playoff-style brackets. Bear fans compared photos and voted online for their favorites from last Wednesday to Tuesday night.

For humans, Fat Bear Week is a fun way to learn, from a distance, about nature and Alaska. The annual elimination tournament began in 2014 as a way to celebrate how fat and healthy the park’s bears are. 

Katmai is one of the most famous places for bear watching in Alaska. Visitors to the park and its Bear Cam webpage can watch the bears splash around in the Brooks River and binge on migrating sockeye salmon. Competition aside, the bears are on a mission to consume enough calories to last them throughout the long winter ahead, when they might hibernate blissfully in their dens for up to six months. If only we could do the same.

Katmai’s bears can grow to well over 1,000 pounds (453 kg) from summer feasting. They can also lose a third of their body weight during hibernation. That makes Fat Bear Week about “survival of the fattest,” as the Park Service puts it.

Katmai, a 4 million-acre park sprawling over mountains, lakes, streams and coastline, is famous for having the world’s densest population of brown bears, the coastal version of grizzlies.

Within Katmai, the Brooks River is a prime place for brown bears to feast. There, bears congregate in summer and fall to snatch salmon swimming upstream to spawning grounds, with much of the action captured by a webcam operated by explore.org, one of the Fat Bear Week partners.

This year’s champion, 747, is one of the park’s biggest bears and was estimated to weigh over 1,400 pounds after bulking up last September. It was the first time the park was able to gauge the actual weight of the gargantuan bears by using a 3D scanner. As a boss bear, Chunk easily dominates some of the best fishing spots in Katmai — like the coveted “jacuzzi” below the Brooks Falls, which Katmai describes as a sort of “plunge pool” where the bears can simply sit and wait for the fish to come close enough for them to pin with their paws or voluptuous figures.

This year, the river was more of a bear paradise than usual, thanks to a record salmon run, said Naomi Doak, a media ranger at Katmai.

What was scarce along the Brooks River was people. Peak summer normally sees about 500 visitors a day but with the coronavirus pandemic, that was down to 50 to 100, she said.

“The combination of the big salmon run and fewer people, this has really handed the river to the bears,” she said. (Reuters)