Chunk, a 1,200-Pound Bear with a Broken Jaw, Crowned Champion of Fat Bear Week

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Chunk, an imposing brown bear with a fractured jaw, clinched victory on Tuesday in the popular Fat Bear Week competition — marking his first triumph after placing second for the last three years.

This annual online event invites spectators to watch 12 bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve through live webcams, allowing them to vote in a week-long, bracket-style, single-elimination contest. The bear known officially as Bear 32, but affectionately called Chunk, defeated Bear 856, who lacks a nickname, in the final round, according to results published on the organizers’ website.

Contest officials estimated Chunk’s weight at about 1,200 pounds. Although weighing each bear during the contest isn’t feasible due to safety issues, Chunk and others have previously had their mass assessed using LIDAR, a laser-based technology that aids in calculating weight.

“Even with his broken jaw, he still ranks as one of the most formidable bears at Brooks River,” explained Mike Fitz, a naturalist from explore.org. Fitz mentioned that Chunk probably injured his jaw while fighting with another bear.

The contest enjoys immense popularity. This year, it drew in over 1.5 million votes from enthusiasts who observed the bears feast on an unprecedented salmon run as they fished in the Brooks River, located approximately 300 miles from Anchorage.

This surge of salmon is the largest in the recollection of both the bears and the humans who have been organizing the Fat Bear Week competition since 2014, as stated by Naomi Boak, a spokesperson for the Katmai Conservancy.

That abundance “decreased conflict in the river since salmon were readily available,” Boak said in an email. In Tuesday’s announcement, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated around 200,000 salmon made their way up Brooks River.

In leaner years, the toughest bears jockey for the best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, where the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they fight their way upstream to spawn.

This year, Brooks Falls fishing spots were often empty as bears hunted up and down stream. There was even room for humans to fish. At one point Monday, one of the Explore.org live cameras showed two people calmly casting fishing rods along the river even as brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.

Voters in the online contest could review before and after photos of the bears, lean at the start of summer and fattened at the end. The bears are not actually weighed — that would be too dangerous and difficult — and some fans choose their favorite based on looks or backstory.

The live cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments in 2024 when mother bear 128 Grazer ’s cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub. Grazer fought Chunk, but the cub ultimately died. After the dramatic fight, voting fans handed Grazer a victory over Chunk.

Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies. They spend summers catching and eating as many salmon as possible so they can fatten up for hibernation in Alaska’s cold, lean winters.