WASHINGTON — Despite a barrage of last-minute voter fraud, Fat Bear Week has come to an end with a reigning champ.
Bear 747 flew past his competition early on and was crowned the fattest of them all in the yearly weeklong poll Fat Bear Week. The poll celebrates brown bears in Katmai National Park stuffing themselves with salmon as they bulk up for the pending hibernation period.
Bear 747, whose appearance resembles that of its jumbo jet namesake, renewed his second title as Fat Bear on Tuesday night. The adult male brown bear with a signature floppy right ear had previously won the 2020 Fat Bear Week.
The battle for crowned Fat Bear was between bear 747 and bear 901. Contestants are tracked using numbers, like "mischievous meatball" 335, but fan favorites from past years have their own names.
747 was first identified in 2004 as a young male bear. He has since then become one of the largest brown bears on Earth, perhaps weighing as much as 1,400 pounds. His two titles as Fat Bear only further reinforce that claim.
Viewers of the "bear cam" watched as select brown bears underwent stark transformations. The park says male bears can start out weighing 600-900 pounds, bulking up to well over 1,200 pounds by November.
The chubby champ of 2022 stood against tough competition and nearly suffered a shocking loss, when just a day earlier the voting polls were stuffed with spam votes.
Organizers first got suspicious when one chunky contender, 435 or "Holly," rebounded from being thousands of votes behind fellow competitor 747 in just hours.
"While not unheard of, it is very uncommon for a bear to come back late in the day like that," a spokesperson for co-organizer Explore.org said via email. "We ended up finding just over 9,000 spam votes."
However, the park assured voters that it has reviewed previous matchups and found no fraud. Explore.org also added a captcha to the poll — something the organization said seems to be working so far.
-- Val Lick contributed to this report.
