Fat Bear Week Lets Fans Vote for Whole Bear Families

For the first time in its 12-year history, Alaska’s Fat Bear Week is putting entire bear families on the ballot. Rangers at Katmai National Park and Preserve said they added full households to the bracket to celebrate mother bears, who must fatten not only themselves but also their cubs before winter, Alaska Public Media reported.

The change has delighted fans of the bracket-style competition, which invites the public to vote for the brown bear that has packed on the most weight preparing for hibernation. Voting opened Tuesday, September 22, and a winner will be crowned Tuesday, September 29.

A First for the Competition

This year’s field is a 16-competitor, single-elimination bracket: 11 solo adult bears, including the defending champion known as Chunk, and five bear families that compete as a team, according to the Anchorage Daily News. The families are known by their numbers — 132, 284, 610, 806, and 901.

Park officials said a record number of bear families feasted on salmon at Brooks River this summer, and rangers wanted to give the mothers their due.

“Moms obviously never get enough credit, so it’s kind of fun to see them getting more credit in the bear world,” said Rebecca Mahan, a fan following the contest from Ireland.

Ranger Sarah Bruce said the cubs are a highlight. “The spring cubs are always my favorite bears,” she said.

The Stories Behind the Families

While every bear faces a challenge to get fat, some family stories stand out. Bear 806 adopted a 2.5-year-old cub while also raising a biological cub born this spring — a rare “blended family” that the park says shows “behavioral flexibility and a willingness to extend her devotion beyond her biological cub.”

Adoption is uncommon among brown bears. The National Park Service has documented only a handful of cases at Brooks River, making 806’s situation especially notable. Her maternal instincts are not universally gentle, however: in July, live cameras captured her killing and partly eating the cub of another contestant, Bear 909.

Bear 132, an experienced mother raising three spring cubs, faces a harder job than most. Fan Tiffany Weeks of Minnesota said raising triplets means splitting every catch.

“It’s hard to get fat when you’re taking care of other people,” Weeks said. “132 has to split all of the fish that she catches with her triplets, and she has to nurse triplets in the prime of summer.” The cubs, she added, are “fat little meatballs.”

Bear 901 lost one of her cubs over the summer; her surviving cub is described as chunky. Other competitors are mothers whose cubs have already grown. Bear 910 adopted her sister’s cub and raised it alongside her own before striking out on her own — a story that earned her the nickname “Auntie Bear” from Mahan.

“It started because she looked really rotund,” Mahan said. “She’s an aunt and I love being an auntie. I am out fly fishing, and then I worked with adopted kiddos, so it was kind of a great parallel.”

The Bears Broke the Internet

The competition is no longer a niche Alaskan pastime. Voting opened Tuesday to the biggest first-day turnout in its history, overwhelming the voting servers.

“THE BEARS HAVE BROKEN THE INTERNET. Literally,” the park wrote in a Facebook post. “Apparently the internet was not prepared to handle this much fat bear.”

Explore.org, which hosts the online tournament, confirmed the overload. “We had our biggest Day 1 turnout of all time and experienced some system overload,” the organization said, adding that votes already cast still count, KTUU reported. The park extended first-round voting to Wednesday, with polls open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Alaska time at fatbearweek.org.

Last year’s contest drew more than 1.5 million voters from more than 100 countries, according to Alaska Public Media. The event began in 2014 as a one-day affair with about 1,700 votes.

Why Families, and Why Now

Including families is a thematic shift as much as a format change. The separate cub-versus-cub bracket known as Fat Bear Week Junior is not happening this year; instead, young cubs compete as part of family units in the main bracket, Popular Science noted.

The move also reflects a summer of dramatic bear-cam moments at Brooks River, from cubs tumbling over waterfalls to a rare adoption. Katmai naturalist Mike Fitz said the brown bears have reached “peak fat” and are ready for the long, salmon-less winter ahead.

The biology behind the contest is straightforward. Every summer, brown bears gather at Brooks Falls for the sockeye salmon run, eating as many as 30 fish a day to build fat reserves. Adult males typically weigh 600 to 900 pounds in midsummer and can exceed 1,000 pounds by fall; females are about a third smaller. During winter torpor, bears do not eat or drink and lose roughly a third of their body weight. About 2,200 brown bears live within Katmai, a 6,562-square-mile park on the Alaska Peninsula, but only those that frequent the main Brooks Camp area are eligible for the bracket.

More Than a Popularity Contest

Underneath the memes and nicknames, the event functions as a fundraiser and a public-education tool. Donations to the Katmai Conservancy’s Otis Fund — named for a four-time champion — made between September 22 and October 3 will be matched by explore.org, according to Popular Science.

Weeks, the Minnesota fan, said the record turnout matters for that reason. “It just means more people are discovering this and it is, at the end of the day, a fundraiser for Katmai Conservancy, which supports the national park,” she said.

The contest’s cultural reach has spread beyond Alaska. This year it inspired “Fat Marmot Week,” a Colorado competition among yellow-bellied marmots hosted by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s Marmot Project.

What’s Next

Round 1 wraps this week, with no voting over the weekend. The finals are scheduled for September 29, when the 2026 champion — solo bear or family unit — will be crowned.

For Weeks, the expanded format carries a sentimental weight. “I think some of these older bears, we could just miss our opportunity to vote for them and give them their well-deserved win if we don’t take it,” she said.

This year, more than ever, the mothers get their moment.