None
EN
What to know about Fat Bear Week, a competition to be the chonkiest brown bear
[]
104.1 KSGF
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — After gorging all summer on sockeye salmon, the portliest brown bears on the Alaska Peninsula will battle it out to see who will be named the fattest of them all in the wildly popular online voting contest called Fat Bear Week.
There are about 2,200 brown bears within Katmai, a 6,562-square-mile (16,997-square-kilometer) park on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner toward the Aleutian Islands.
The brown bears at Katmai are among the largest in the world.
Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org who started the Fat Bear Contest at Katmai when he was a ranger there, said that the only bears that are bigger are on nearby Kodiak Island.
Brooks Falls is famous for brown bears snagging salmon out of the air as the fish try to jump upstream to get to their spawning ground.
['chonkiest'
'fat'
'know'
'competition'
'contestants'
'bears'
'online'
'pounds'
'bear'
'contest'
'voting'
'week'
'brown'
'salmon'
'katmai']