ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) Chunk, a massive brown bear sporting a broken jaw, emerged victorious Tuesday in the well-loved Fat Bear Week competition. This marks his first win after coming in a close second for the past three years.

This annual virtual event invites viewers to follow 12 bears at Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve through live webcams, casting votes in a bracket-style, single-elimination format over the course of a week. Officially known as Bear 32, Chunk edged out Bear 856—who remains without a nickname—in the final round, as per the results on the organizers’ website.

The organizers of the contest estimated Chunk’s weight at around 1,200 pounds. While individual bears aren’t weighed during the event for safety reasons, past weight estimates have been supported by using laser technology known as LIDAR to scan their density.

“Even with his broken jaw, he’s still one of the toughest and largest bears at Brooks River,” said Mike Fitz, a naturalist with explore.org. Fitz suggested Chunk’s jaw injury likely resulted from a fight with another bear.

The contest enjoys immense popularity. This edition gathered over 1.5 million votes from fans who tuned in to watch the bears feast on an unprecedented run of fall salmon in the Brooks River, located about 300 miles from Anchorage.

According to Naomi Boak, a spokesperson for the Katmai Conservancy, this is the largest salmon surge in the memory of both the bears and the organizers who have been hosting the Fat Bear Week since 2014.

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.