A brown bear weighing over 500kg (78st 8lb) has overcome a broken jaw to become the winner of Fat Bear Week 2025.<\/p>\n
Chunk received the most votes in a competition between 12 brown bears in which people pick the bear they believe “best exemplifies fatness and success” as they prepare for winter hibernation.<\/p>\n
Park rangers at Alaska’s Katmai National Park, home to some of the largest brown bears in the world, praised Chunk’s resilience in learning how to fish with his injury. <\/p>\n
“He reminded us how resilient bears are and how they have the ability to recover from injury and hardship,” ranger Naomi Boak said.<\/p>\n
Voters from more than 100 countries followed the action at Katmai’s Brooks River through live web streams, where bears could be seen scooping up salmon and eyeing up their competition. <\/p>\n
One voter, Amy Hall, called Chunk an “inspiration” on an explore.org livestream, a nature network that produces the contest in partnership with the National Park Service and the Katmai Conservancy. <\/p>\n
“Chunk and I both went through some stuff this summer… and we both have learned to adapt and heal. Thank you, Chunk, for being an inspiration,” she said. <\/p>\n
Chunk broke his jaw in June and observers suspect the injury was the result of a fight with another bear due to the timing of it – during mating season – and the nature of it, according to Chunk’s profile on the Fat Bear Week website.<\/p>\n
Adult male bears average up to 408kg in mid-summer and often pack on the equivalent of 25% of their bodyweight by autumn. The largest males often tip the scales at more than 540kg.<\/p>\n
Chunk beat one of the biggest bears along the river, known as 856, by more than 30,000 votes. <\/p>\n
Explore.org’s Mike Fitz, a former ranger, said Chunk and 856 were “real-life rivals on the river”. <\/p>\n
The contest is Fitz’s brainchild. What started as a one-day competition with about 1,700 votes in 2014 has since gone global, drawing in and educating fans across the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A brown bear weighing over 500kg (78st 8lb) has overcome a broken jaw to become the winner of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-182795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}