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All hail the new Fat Bear Champion
is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
The votes are in, and the winner of Fat Bear Week 2025 is the indomitable Bear 32, also known as Chunk.
The public votes for their favorite brown bear each year in the March Madness-style tournament held by Katmai National Park and Preserve in partnership with the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy and online portal Explore.org.
Weighing in at around 1,200 pounds, Chunk captured voters’ hearts this year with his perseverance. He showed up to catch salmon at the Brooks River with a broken jaw that’s healing but likely now a long-term disability.
Chunk captured voters’ hearts this year with his perseverance
The brown bears need to pack on the pounds each fall, gaining as much as four pounds a day. That gets them through the winter, when they might lose as much as a third of their stored body fat.
This year’s contenders got extra fat and healthy thanks to an enormous salmon run. On top of having one of the biggest populations of brown bears in the world — around 2,200 — Katmai National Park says it’s also blessed with one of the healthiest wild sockeye salmon runs left on our warming world despite record-breaking high temperatures threatening previous years.
Even with Fat Bear Week coming to a close — narrowly avoiding a government shutdown — you can still catch the action on explore.org’s live Brown Bear Cam.
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