All hail the new Fat Bear Champion

Bear #32, besides known arsenic Chunk, has won Fat Bear Week. | Photo: Christine Loberg via National Park Service

The votes are in, and the victor of Fat Bear Week 2025 is the indomitable Bear 32, besides known arsenic Chunk.

The public votes for their favourite brownish carnivore each twelvemonth successful the March Madness-style tourney held by Katmai National Park and Preserve successful concern with the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy and online portal Explore.org.

Weighing successful astatine astir 1,200 pounds, Chunk captured voters’ hearts this twelvemonth with his perseverance. He showed up to drawback salmon astatine the Brooks River with a breached jaw that’s healing but apt present a semipermanent disability.

The brownish bears request to pack connected the pounds each fall, gaining arsenic overmuch arsenic 4 pounds a day. That gets them done the winter, erstwhile they mightiness suffer arsenic overmuch arsenic a 3rd of their stored assemblage fat.

This year’s contenders got other abdominous and steadfast acknowledgment to an tremendous salmon run. On apical of having 1 of the biggest populations of brownish bears successful the satellite — around 2,200 — Katmai National Park says it’s besides blessed with 1 of the healthiest chaotic sockeye salmon runs near connected our warming satellite contempt record-breaking precocious temperatures threatening erstwhile years.

Even with Fat Bear Week coming to a adjacent — narrowly avoiding a government shutdown — you tin inactive drawback the enactment connected explore.org’s unrecorded Brown Bear Cam.