Fat Bear Week 2023: Winner is a feisty mama bear who blew away the competition!
King Salmon, Alaska - The votes are in for Katmai National Park's annual Fat Bear Week 2023 and fans of the fat and fabulous have crowned 128 Grazer as our new ursine queen!
The 9th annual Fat Bear Week competition was a complete blowout!
The winner of Fat Bear Week 2023 trounced the competition in the Fat Bear Tuesday final by more than 85,000 votes.
So without further ado, all hail the Queen of Fat Bear Week 2023: 128 Grazer!
"Voters have spoken LOUDLY. The gutsy girl grounded the guy with a gut. 32 Chunk, proved his prominent posterior was worthy of a whopping win. But in the end, Chunk got Grazered," Katmai National Park wrote in their announcement.
The Fat Bear Week 2023 winner put in the hours
This first-time winner is a feisty sow.
Grazer often preemptively starts fights with bigger, more dominant bears to protect her cubs – though as of this year, her young are all grown up and living their own lives.
Still, other bears haven't forgotten her ferocity. She angled her way to shockingly rotund by putting in the hours and continuing to snack even when the sun went down.
Grazer walloped the competition, according to Explore.org, which tabulates the online contest for the national park. She took in 108,321 votes to Chunk’s 23,134.
Fat Bear Week 2023 was full of surprises
Katmai's annual Fat Bear Week competition allows the public to vote for their favorite bulky beast in an online brackets-style tournament.
The number of votes in 2023 shattered last year's record, despite the new cybersecurity details installed on the Explore.org Fat Bear Week page to prevent voter fraud. In 2022, a bot was programmed to cast 9,000 fraudulent votes for Holly.
In this year's battle of the bulky, former champs and favorites were voted out of the running in the very first brackets.
Arguably the most famous bear of Brooks River, 480 Otis, lost in his first match-up with the winning mama bear and last year's runner-up 901. The 2022 winner, 747, was also bulldozed by Grazer.
Grazer's win makes her the third sow to win the tournament. The other champs are Holly, who won in 2019, and the 2018 winner 409, Beadnose.
Even if you missed this year's throw down of the thick, you can still watch the bears gore themselves on salmon at Brooks Falls on explore.org.
Cover photo: Katmai Conservancy/ courtesy F Jimenez