The days have begun to get shorter, the nights are cooler and leaves are beginning to fall from their trees, signaling some of my favorite parts of the year: sweater weather, Halloween festivities and Fat Bear Week. 

I first learned about Fat Bear Week last October on social media and it immediately became one of my absolute favorite events. Put on by explore, a multimedia organization dedicated to documenting “extraordinary causes,” according to their website and Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, Fat Bear is a one week event that showcases bears at Katmai as they prepare for hibernation. 

This year, Fat Bear Week was Oct. 5-11 and participants could vote each day from 12-9 p.m. for the bear they deemed the fattest. The tournament is single elimination, so the losing bears are removed from the competition. 

Anyone can watch the live bear cams on explore’s website to size up each bear and get a peak into their lives in the wild. 

Katmai National Park is home to some of the largest bears on Earth, according to their website, with male adult bears weighing more than 1,200 pounds and adult females weighing around 700 pounds by fall. The organization stresses that Fat Bear Week is important to highlight why bears need to bulk up before winter and their hibernation, where they can lose up to a third of their body weight.

Fat bears also show how the region where Katmai is located is doing, as the more fat bears there are, the more resources are available to support the population. 

Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 after a fan of the explore bear cams posted images they took from watching the cams of the same bears but at different times throughout the year. The first contest was named Fat Bear Tuesday and was a single day event but because the event was so popular, in 2015 it was expanded to a full week. In 2021, over 800,000 votes were cast throughout Fat Bear Week.

This year, 12 bears competed for the title of Fat Bear Week champion, including Otis, Chunk, Grazer, Walker and Holly. 

My favorite bear, Otis, has been crowned fattest bear four times, in 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2021. He is between 25-27 years old and is missing teeth, but still was a fierce competitor this year. Otis was sadly defeated on Oct. 8 by Bear 901, who had almost doubled his votes at 44,080 to Otis’ 21,074. 

In 2021, explore added Fat Bear Junior to the event, which features cubs as they grow and double in size. This year, four families of cubs battled for the title of champion: bear 94’s triplets, Grazer’s twins, bear 909’s yearling and bear 910’s spring cub. 

This year’s Fat Bear Champion is bear 747, who defeated bear 901 with over 68,000 votes. Over one million votes were cast during Fat Bear Week this year. 

No matter the official winner, Fat Bear Week is a fun and silly way to learn more about bears and to see some incredibly large animals in their natural habitat. Though this year’s contest is over, I encourage you to go to watch explore’s bear cams and to check out the competitors, they are guaranteed to make you smile. 

Image via explore.org