Chunk the bear wins Fat Bear Week over 15 skinnier opponents. graphic by Katmai Conservancy
Fat Bear Week 2025 welcomes a new champion: Chunk.
Fat Bear Week is an annual online competition organized by the National Park Service and Katmai Conservancy at the Katmai National Park in Alaska, where people vote on the fattest bear in the park. With a “March-madness” style bracket, the furry competitors go toe-to-toe to gain as much weight as they can during the summer before they begin hibernation. The competition has been held since 2014, and has gained a lot of popularity online ever since then. Over 1.7 million votes were cast this year, breaking last year’s record of 1.3 million. One of those 1.7 million votes belonged to Thomas Jefferson’s own Rachel Teeter, a chemistry teacher and die-hard “Chunk the Bear” supporter.
The tournament takes place at the end of summer in September each year, the season that bears use to prepare for hibernation in the winter. There are many different components of the competition. The Fat Bear Week website includes before and after photos of each bear, not only to demonstrate how much weight they have gained but also how to identify them. Along with photos of each bear, they each have short “biographies.” For example, Chunk’s (the current champion) biography says, “Bears that are unwary or unlucky often find themselves under threat when he is nearby, yet even bears as large as Chunk face challenge and hardship. Chunk returned to Brooks River in June 2025 with a freshly broken jaw.” Voters utilize these descriptions and photos, as well as the live stream of the park which is aired on the website during Fat Bear Week, to vote on each bear over the week. Every day, different bears are pitted against each other and the winners move into the next bracket until the top two bears are declared.
This year’s winner suffered from a jaw injury at the beginning of the summer, but was able to overcome his adversities and win the championship, claiming the crown at a whopping 1,200 pounds. Chunk has been fighting to win the competition for several years, after being the runner up in both 2020 and 2023. This year he joined the hall of champions, alongside five other bears. The most notable of those is Otis, with four championships, and Grazer, with two consecutive wins and who was the first mother bear to be declared the fattest bear. As fun as the concept of Fat Bear Week is, it is also a great way to promote the protection of national parks and the wildlife that lives there. Teeter, who votes every year and promotes the competition to each of her classes, said, “It takes place on federally owned land, so it gives people a chance to see why we keep that land for wildlife and how it’s being used. It also gives us a chance to interact with bears without getting near bears, because they’re dangerous.” Teeter’s personal favorite part of Fat Bear Week is reading about the bears on the website, and seeing how they interact in the park in the live footage.
This online competition is a fun way to promote the protection of brown bears and national parks. Voting only requires an email verification, and is run on the Fat Bear Week website itself. Katmai National Park will continue to hold the competition for years to come. Tune in next year to see who will be declared the fattest bear of 2026, and to discover if Chunk will continue to be the greatest bear of all time, as Teeter and many others believe he is.
