Welcome toFat Bear Week 2019! Katmai National Park's bears spent the summer gorging989? ??? ??? ??4,500-calorie salmon, and they've transformed into rotund giants, some over 1,000 pounds. The park is holding its annual playoff-like competition for the fattest of the fat bears (you can vote onlinebetween Oct. 2 and Oct. 8), and Mashable will be following the ursine activity.
In a realm of profoundly fat bears, Holly may be the fattest of them all.
Alaskan bear-viewing guide Drew Hamilton, an affable character with a great red beard, just returned from Katmai National Park's Brooks River, where the fat bears dwell. He saw Holly, or officially, Bear 435.
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He couldn't miss her.
"You almost get the sense watching her that she’s getting fatter before your eyes," said Hamilton, who is also the president of the non-profit organization Friends of McNeil River, a group opposed to the large-scale mine that the Trump administration is considering for development in the heart of fat bear country.
"She’s getting fatter before your eyes"
"I watch bears professionally," noted Hamilton. "I see more bears than just about anybody out there." But rarely, if ever, does he come across a bear as fantastically hefty as Holly is this year.
"This is next level," Hamilton said.
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Holly, like her ursine cohort, has capitalized on an ecosystem that flourishes with sockeye salmon. She often grows fat. But this year, unlike many previous years, she has no needy, helpless cubs to feed. Holly, in a Hollywood-like bear story, even adopted and fed an abandoned cub in 2014.
Now, however, every fish she catches is hers.
Between naps in which Holly "appeared to sleep while sitting up," Hamilton watched her methodically pull exhausted fish (salmon, after breeding, or spawning, weaken and die) from the river bank. She's still getting fatter.
As fat as Holly is, she does have formidable competition in this year's Fat Bear Week, where the public (like you) votes on the fattest bears. Namely, there's Bear 747, a massive male.
SEE ALSO: What would it be like to smell the world like a bear?747 is the largest bear that Mike Fitz, a former park ranger at bear-filled Katmai National Park and currently a resident naturalist for explore.org, has ever seen. Fitz has candidly endorsed Bear 747 as this year's fattest bear.
"He’s the real deal, the one, the only, the titanic bear known as 747. He deserves your vote," Fitz recently wrote online.
But, Fitz acknowledges 747's competition, Holly.
"Like so many things in life, 747’s Fat Bear Week victory is not guaranteed. My 2017 and 2018 endorsements for 747 were followed by his sound defeat," Fitz acknowledged. "This year, his competition is just as fat if not fatter." He noted the explore.org the footage below.
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Fitz thinks Bear 747 could be approaching 1,200 pounds. Hamilton, who is a former assistant manager at the bear-filled McNeil River State Game Sanctuary and Refuge, thinks that could be an underestimate. "[1,200 pounds] strikes me as ridiculously low," noted Hamilton, who also spied 747 fishing this past week.
Though, however big 747 is, Holly "may be even proportionally fatter" than 747 and other big males, Fitz told Mashable this week.
The competition is fierce.
"It's almost like the river got higher when Holly went in the water to catch a fish," said Hamilton.