Fat Bear Week is a week-long celebration dedicated to how fat the brown bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska, can get. The bears come to Brooks River every year; they hibernate to eat the salmon that are migrating upstream to lay their eggs. Fat Bear Week is dedicated to celebrating Katmai’s thriving brown bear population and is going strong with over 150,000 voters so far this year.
The first Fat Bear Week was originally founded by park ranger Mike Fritz in 2014. It started off as a one-day event and soon turned into a week-long celebration. Now, in its 11th year, Fat Bear Week is welcoming a new set of chunky bears, including previous winners Chunk and Grazer.
The requirements for the winning bear are up to the voters. Since the bears in Katmai live in the wild, the best researchers can do is guess the weight of the competitors. Participants can vote on which they think is the chunkiest, which bear captures their heart, or any other requirements they want.
The Fat Bear Week website tells voters to “vote for the bear you believe best exemplifies fatness and success in brown bears.”
“Fat Bear Week enables people from around the world to actively engage in learning about bears while cheering for their favorite competitor,” said Mark Sturm, Katmai Park Superintendent.
This year, the competitors are looking especially round; the largest, Chunk, is estimated to weigh 1,200 pounds, about 300 pounds over the usual weight for male brown bears. The brown bears at Katmai Park have always been on the larger side. This contributes to the famous Brooks River, which fills with salmon every year, for the bears to gorge themselves on before they go into hibernation.
According to NPS, the bears are “drawn to the large number of salmon readily available” in the Brooks River.
This year, people around the world are particularly interested in Fat Bear Week because of the amount of salmon they have been eating. Fat Bear Week started with the locals comparing the size of the brown bears, and now it has become an international celebration.
“Over a million people from more than 100 countries cast their votes in Fat Bear Week,” said ScienceAlert about the 2025 Fat Bear Week.
“The bears are extremely fat this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to how fat they are,” said Fitz.
During Fat Bear Week, Katmai Park streams live camera feeds on its website for you to watch the local brown bears. Every year, hundreds of people tune in to watch the footage streamed on YouTube. This annual celebration of the brown bears is a great time to support the natural world, so next year, don’t forget to vote.