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Do you have your bracket filled out for Fat Bear Week?
The yearly social media event—conducted by park rangers at Katmai National Park and Preserve, located on 4 million acres in Southwestern Alaska—marks the end of summer season and the high point of the bears' pre-hibernation weight before they sleep throughout the winter months. And the 5-year-old event has never been more popular.
Members of the park's Facebook page gather to guess upon the weights of two bracketed bears per day, picking their favorite among the ursine competitors, until October 8. Dubbed Fat Bear Tuesday by the park, that's when the winner will be crowned.
Fat bear fanatics often get very into the contest. In fact, some folks track the bears in question throughout the summer months via live bear cams stationed all over the park, watching their progress as the months go by. They have a tendency to attach nicknames to the bears, which often stick and become part of their bracketing identification.
Katmai Conservancy media ranger Naomi Boak has two favorites this year. She told NPR that Nos. 435 and 747—the bears are numbered instead of named for the most part to avoid anthropomorphizing the bears—are her favorites, the latter being named so because he's "as big as a jumbo jet."
"He was so big he looked like he was ready to hibernate in July. He's the size of two bears. They lose a third of their body fat over the winter," Boak said. "So they need all that fat to survive." And there's a good reason for that, as a hormone that inhibits hunger switches off, making the bears ravenous.
All of the bears involved in the contest are Coastal Brown Bears, and all of them feast on the salmon running up the Brooks River all summer to get to their scale-tipping weights.
Boak and her assistant, Brooklyn White, pick the bears every year, and they also take "before" and "after" pictures of the bears—"before" being the bears just after they've woken from hibernation and the "after" being them at their roly-poly October weights.
Hopefully this year's pack will make it through with flying colors. Last year's champ—No. 409, nicknamed Beadnose and weighing in at over 1,000 pounds—had not made a reappearance in the park this season.
"All of it is a fun—and it is fun—way to educate people on the struggle for survival that these bears go through and the dramatic changes involved that. They are going to lose about one-third of their body weight over winter hibernation, and in order to survive the next year, they have to gain all of that back, in a few short weeks over the summer," Andrew LaValle, a park ranger at Katmai, told NPR last year.
