Why this year’s Fat Bear Week contestants are rounder than ever
“The bears are extremely fat this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to how fat they are,” says the former ranger who helped invent the popular contest.
In June of 2012, when Mike Fitz was working as a park ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwest Alaska, he decided to set up cameras to capture the moose, bald eagles and bears in their natural habitat. As a longtime ranger, Fitz had observed the animals up close honing their hunting and fishing skills and preparing each year for hibernation. Now he wanted to give others that chance as well. The cameras, positioned at key sites around the park, could livestream 24 hours a day into the homes of wildlife enthusiasts, many of whom might never get the chance to visit Katmai’s remote location.
Fitz placed a camera near the summit of Dumpling Mountain, with a breathtaking view of the lush spruce forests and winding river below. He positioned one overlooking Naknek Lake, where gulls skimmed the water’s surface and salmon spawned. And he placed them at multiple spots along Brooks River, where hundreds of brown bears congregated in the spring and summer to fish, play and laze about. Those bears had captured Fitz’s heart, and he knew viewers would love them too.
“When I started to work at Brooks River, I got to see the same bears every day, and I learned that most of the bears that we see at Brooks River come back to the river every year. It was kind of like a light-bulb moment for me,” he said in a recent interview. “I got to see animals with different personalities and dispositions, different ways of making a living. I started to interpret those stories to the general public, and found that the public really engaged with the stories.”
The webcams were an immediate hit—particularly the Brooks River bear cams—with hundreds of viewers tuning in during the spring and summer to watch the brown bears converge on the falls at Brooks River where the salmon jumped on their way to their spawning ground. But it wasn’t until Fitz left the park service and started working with Explore.org—a live nature network funded by the Annenberg Foundation that had partnered with Katmai to host the webcam feeds—that they really took off.
More than a decade later, eager fans collect in subreddits to discuss the bearcams; they write lengthy online guides and post TikToks of their favorite cam moments; there’s even a hashtag. And of course—most famously—there’s Fat Bear Week.
A collaborative effort between Explore.org, Katmai National Park and the Katmai Conservancy, the annual competition pits the Katmai bears against each other as they prepare for hibernation to see who represents the fattest and “most successful.” In late summer, Fitz works alongside the park rangers to identify a list of contenders, which they arrange into a March Madness-style bracket. He writes lengthy biographies for each bear—which are tagged with a number and occasionally a nickname—and posts before-and-after photos showing the bear’s weight gain over the course of the summer. Throughout the week, online users vote in the single-elimination tournament before the year’s fattest bear is crowned.
The competition has grown enormously since it was first launched as a Facebook vote in 2014. Last year, more than 1.2 million people voted, and fans eagerly await the contestant reveal so they can choose a bear to back. (“I’ve been waiting all year for this,” one user recently commented on a TikTok posted by Explore announcing the 2025 event.) The competition is highly subjective— the winner of Fat Bear week may not actually be the heaviest—and different bears develop cult-like followings. (“901 is *that* girl for sure but Chunk and Flotato are gonna give her a run for her money!” another TikTok user recently commented.)
Fitz, who says he could talk about the personality quirks and idiosyncrasies of the Katmai bears forever, isn’t surprised by the enthusiasm, since he too shares it.
“It's positive, it's a celebration, and it's also really fun,” he said of the event. “And in general, people like to look at pictures of very round animals.”
Wildlife is unpredictable, which means the competition isn’t without spectacle. Last year the beginning of Fat Bear Week was postponed when a male bear killed a female bear in view of the livecam. And 2024’s winner, a fierce mama bear named Grazer, won the title for the second year in a row after beating out Chunk, a dominant male who killed one of her cubs earlier in the season.
But there’s human-engineered drama as well. In 2023, a hiker was rescued after he was spotted on the Dumpling Mountain livecam asking for help. And 2022’s competition was marred by a voting scandal, in which Fitz and the rangers discovered that several thousand fake votes had been cast for Bear 435 in the semi-finals. “It appears someone has decided to spam the Fat Bear Week poll, but fortunately it is easy for us to tell which votes are fraudulent,” Katmai tweeted, before announcing that Bear 747 was the real semi-final winner.
This year, though, Fitz says things might be different. The salmon run was exceptional—“the river was wall to wall salmon for like, six weeks”—giving the bears a hearty fish supply and releasing them from food competition.
“They didn't need to compete for spots at Brooks Falls,” Fitz said. “They could spread out throughout the river and basically pick up fish anytime that they wanted to.”
With plenty of salmon to go around, 2025’s bears are even chunkier than usual. “The bears are extremely fat this year, and I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to how fat they are,” he said.
In a world where “things suck for wildlife and ecosystems around the world,” Fitz said, Fat Bear Week provides a temporary antidote, spotlighting a fully intact ecosystem with wildlife that’s thriving.
“I think Fat Bear Week resonates with so many people because it’s a celebration of the success of wild animals. It's a showcase of a healthy ecosystem. And those are things worth celebrating,” he said.
