SMART NEWS

‘Highly Defensive’ Mother Bear Grazer Defeats Male That Killed Her Cub to Win Fat Bear Week

For the second year in a row, Grazer bested the massive male named Chunk to take the crown in the single elimination online popularity contest at Katmai National Park and Preserve

Sarah Kuta

Daily Correspondent

Large brown bear against backdrop of trees
Grazer (128) is a back-to-back champion of Fat Bear Week—and the first working mother to win the popular online contest. NPS / M. Carenza

A mother named Grazer has been crowned queen of Fat Bear Week for the second year in a row.

Grazer—known officially as 128—once again defeated a male named Chunk (32) in the final round of the annual online tournament on Tuesday. Grazer won the rematch by a landslide, besting her challenger by more than 40,000 votes.

She’s the first competitor to win Fat Bear Week while caring for a cub. And, for many of Grazer’s human supporters, her recent victory feels especially triumphant in light of her tragic history with Chunk: Earlier this summer, Chunk attacked and killed one of Grazer’s cubs.

Fat Bear Week is an online, bracket-style tournament that celebrates the brown bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Each year, fans vote on head-to-head matchups between 12 bears in the single elimination contest.

The tournament occurs while the bears are gorging on sockeye salmon in the Brooks River ahead of their winter hibernation—in other words, while they are fattening up. Competitors are asked to vote for the brown bear they believe “best exemplifies fatness and success.”

Katmai National Park and Preserve is home to some of the largest brown bears on the planet. Adult males, for example, typically weigh between 700 to 900 pounds in the middle of the summer—but they can balloon to more than 1,200 pounds by the fall. An estimated 2,200 individuals live within the park, which spans more than four million acres on the Alaska Peninsula.

From June through October, the bears converge upon the Brooks River to take advantage of the annual sockeye salmon run. The fish make a long, difficult journey upstream to their birthplaces, where they reproduce and then die. The hungry mammals can eat upwards of 30 fish each per day.

The river is a source of abundance and nourishment for the bears. But it can also be dangerous.

In July, Grazer’s two cubs were trying to follow their mother into the river when they got suddenly swept over a waterfall, where Chunk and other larger bears were fishing below. Chunk, who is the most dominant bear on the water, attacked the siblings and injured one of the cubs. Grazer tried to intervene, but she was too late—the injured cub died. Live stream cameras captured the dramatic scene.

“She fought in a way I think very few bears—let alone female bears—would do,” says Naomi Boak, a communications consultant at the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy and former Katmai media ranger, to the Washington Post’s Natalie B. Compton. “Chunk is probably two to three times her size … and there was not a moment of hesitation on her part.”

Later in the summer, the cameras also recorded another tragedy: On September 30, a male bear, 469, attacked and killed a female, 402, at the river’s mouth. The male then dragged the female’s body ashore. The incident led to officials postponing the launch of Fat Bear Week by one day.

“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” according to a statement from the national park after the incident. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”

This year’s winner, Grazer, has been returning to the Brooks River since 2005. She’s raising her third litter of cubs and is known as a “highly defensive” mother, according to her Fat Bear Week biography on Explore.org.

“Her fearless nature is respected by other bears who often choose to give her space instead of risking a confrontation,” according to her biography. “This elevates Grazer’s rank in the bear hierarchy above almost all bears except for the largest males.”

She’s easy to distinguish from the other bears fishing on the river, thanks to her conspicuously blond ears. In late summer and fall, her fur becomes grizzled and light brown in color.

Though she lost a cub this year, she’s still one of the most “formidable, successful and adaptable” bears at the park, per Explore.org. “Her story this year demonstrates that even the most skilled and formidable mother bears experience hardship and loss.”

The runner-up, Chunk, is also a force to be reckoned with. At potentially more than 1,200 pounds, he’s one of the largest bears on the river—and the most revered.

“No bear on the river challenged Chunk successfully for fishing spots,” according to his biography. “Bears that were unwary or unlucky found themselves under threat when he was nearby. Even the giants known as 747 and 856 yielded space to him.”

Chunk’s dominance meant he could fish from the best locations and have his pick of the salmon. In one ten-hour period, online viewers counted him eating 42 salmon, which helped fill out his “low-hanging belly and ample hindquarters,” per his biography.

One bear was notably absent from the river this year, a large male named Otis (480) who has won Fat Bear Week four times. It’s not clear what happened to Otis—he might have died or he might have simply found a new fishing location.

In the decade since Fat Bear Week debuted, Otis became famous not just for his many championships, but also for his unique approach to fishing: Rather than duking it out with other bears, he usually sat off to the side in the shallows, waiting for salmon to swim to him.

Fans of Otis and other brown bears can show their support by donating to the Otis Fund, which benefits the Katmai Conservancy. Explore.org, which runs the live cameras and helped create Fat Bear Week, is matching donations made through October 13.

“He’s almost meditative, is the way I would describe it,” says Ed MacKerrow, a scientist and nature photographer who has been visiting Katmai since 2014, to Smithsonian magazine’s Erin Donaghue. “He just minds his own business, and I think a lot of people resonate with that. He’s a good model for us.”

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Sarah Kuta

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.