We officially have a champion of Fat Bear Week and she is glorious

Image: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable

welcome to Big Bear Week at Mashable! Each fall, Katmai National Park hosts a competition in which Alaska's brown bears finish growing for their long winter hibernation. This year, Mashable gets into the action of eating salmon. Appointment with us all week as we watch the clashes every day, and do not forget to vote for each round. Good fishing!

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After eating exceptional amounts of salmon this summer, Bear 409 "Beadnose" has triumphed as the 2018 champion of the Fat Bear Week.

She overthrew a formidable opponent in Bear 747, a dominant bear, whose belly has almost razed the ground.

The two bears – voted by the public on the Facebook page of Katmai National Park – are unquestionably the winners of their wild bear world, a subarctic environment in Alaska where snow has already fallen and where the Winter announces big.

In simple terms, the bigger the fat bear, the more likely it is to survive a six-month winter hibernation.

"Beadnose and 747 have both proven successful in a challenging environment," said Mike Fitz, environmentalist and former ranger of Katmai, in an email. "They have shown that their skills and experience can yield big caloric benefits."

Katmai National Park launched the online Fat Bear Week contest three years ago with the goal of connecting the general public with the evolution of ursine in one of the most popular national parks. remote. (To get there, you need to take a floatplane in Alaska's deep wilderness and land on a glacial lake).

This season, 13 bears have been observed by rangers between June and September.

Each of them, eating sockeye salmon rich in 4,500 calories throughout the summer, has become substantially engorged – even if none as fat as the 747 and 409 bears.

Bear 409 became a kind of Internet sensation after Katmai tweeted his lean-to-fat transformation over the summer.

Image: drossoski / bob al-greene / mashable

She is also a mother known for several litters of babies. She benefited this summer from the absence of newborns. She did not need to share fish with her largely helpless offspring and had the resulting weight gain.

Conversely, Bear 435 "Holly" – a mother famous for once "adopting" an abandoned cub, was accompanied by two excitable babies. Holly, while she was getting fat, was unable to bear the extreme weight that she had had in recent years when she was roaming the river like a solitary bear. Bear 435 lost in quarter-finals of the Fat Bear Week.

The Fat Bear Week, in all its splendor online, ended in 2018. But it is likely that the two bears 747 and 409 are back next summer and consume a large amount of salmon under the watchful eyes of the webcams. 'explore.org.

These wild animals live in a distant kingdom – a country of lynx, bald eagles, wolverines and glowing fish rivers. But the web gives us a glimpse of their wild world; a world in which this year, 409's turned out to be the biggest of all big bears.