🐻 It's Fat Bear Week! What Does It Mean?

Fat Bear Week, the annual contest to find Katmai National Park and Preserve's chunkiest ursine resident, is upon us.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
And Amanda jam Nation. Please Amanda, tell me all about
the Fat Bear Wheel. Oh, this is fabulous, and we're
going to put the pictures of all the fat bears
up on our social secrets. See what we're talking about.
You know, just when the Golden Bachelor is about to start,
we also get this. So every fall, which is every autumn,
brown bears pack on the pounds before hibernation. This is

(00:25):
in the Katmai National Park and it turns into a
global competition. I'm looking at the footage of these bears,
photos of them before and after. They look like enormous walruses.
Before and after they're quite slender. So Fat Bear Week
is an annual tournament celebrating their success as they prepare
for hibernation. Fans all around the world vote for their

(00:46):
favorite chunky bear. It's a single elimination tournament. For each matchup,
you vote for the bear that you believe best exemplifies
fatness and success in brown bears, and the bear with
the most votes goes to the next round, et cetera,
et cetera. Only one will be round Fat Bear Week Champion.
So it's not the fattest bear, it's the cutest fattest bear,
the hot favorite fattest bear. Let me tell you about gee.

(01:08):
The photos from before and after, have a look at that.
They're quite extraordinary. Last year's winner do you want to know?
The last year's winner of the twenty twenty four Fat
Bear Week competition was one two eight Grazer, a mother bear.
She also won the previous year. She beat her rival
thirty two Chunk in the final round by quite a
significant margin. She got over seventy one thousand votes. Chunk

(01:32):
got just over thirty thousand. But what makes this victory
even sweeter or more notable was that Graser's cub had
been killed by Chunk earlier in the summer. Oh goodness,
so it's a full situation going on. Also, you know
why I'm fascinated by this tombian, Well, it's I have
done some research. I'd always heard that a bear shove

(01:55):
something that I thought was called a tombian up its
bottom before it highberdates to stop the insects and stuff
getting in it sleeps a little bit of research from
GPT has told me that it's not actually a tombian.
It's a tappen and it happens naturally. They don't put
anything up there. It happens naturally. So during hibernation, bears

(02:15):
don't eat, drink, or go to the toilet. Over time,
undergested food, sloughed intestinal skills, cells, hair, and bacteria build
up and form what's called a fecal plug. This plug
blocks the intestine so nothing passes out or in while
the bear is sleeping, so it's not inserted, it's formed inside.

(02:35):
And then at the end of hibernation, when the spring
comes and the bear wakes up, it sounds like champagne.
Corks are being popped right around the glade. And well,
they've lost all the weight while they've been sleeping, so
they put this weight on to sustain them because they
don't eat the man shake or something because they sleep. Yeah, well,

(03:00):
why doesn't that happen to us when we go to sleep. Well,
I don't think you're sleeping long enough. Obviously, fecal plug,
A fecal plug. Get onto it all. They'll be playing
at Slip and Not Fest this year.