Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska has named 89 Backpack, an adult male brown bear, the winner of Fat Bear Week 2026, the annual contest that marks the end of the salmon feeding season.
The final was close. Backpack finished with 103,344 votes to 98,253 for 910, an adult female, a margin of just over 5,000.
Fat Bear Week runs as a sports-style bracket. Supporters watch the brown bears fishing at Brooks Falls on the park's livestream, compare photographs of each animal taken early and late in the season, and vote for whichever bear they judge to have gained the most weight.
This year's field was the largest in the competition's 12-year history. For the first time it included bear families, a category made room for by retiring Fat Bear Junior, which had been contested by cubs.
Both finalists arrived with a pedigree. The mother of 910, a bear known as 409 Beadnose, is a former champion. So is Backpack's mother, Holly, whose back he clung to as a cub while she swam the river, which is how he got his name.
Backpack's competition biography describes an animal that avoids trouble. "Unlike many large adult male bears, Backpack hasn't shown much aggression toward his competitors," it reads. "He'll stand up for himself when necessary, but he prefers to use a quiet strength to gain access to preferred fishing spots." Park staff call it quiet toughness. He carries fewer scars than would be expected of a male bear his age, and recovered from an injury in 2007.
The route to the final was uneven. In the semi-finals, 910 won by a little more than 70,000 votes. Backpack advanced by 4,100.
Mike Fitz, a former park ranger and now resident naturalist at Explore.org, the media organisation that helps host the event, had been admiring the runner-up throughout. 910 "looks really great for at this time of the year", he told The New York Times during the competition. "She is a balloon of a bear."
The week also raises money for the Katmai Conservancy, and the livestream draws viewers who follow individual bears across seasons. Naomi Boak, who produced the event for several years, first watched Backpack from an apartment in New York City in 2019 and later moved to Alaska to work with the park.
It is worth being precise about what the result establishes. Fat Bear Week does not weigh bears. It counts people. Backpack is therefore not the fattest bear at Brooks Falls; he is the bear that 103,344 people believed was the fattest bear at Brooks Falls, which under the rules of the competition is the same thing.
This newspaper regards the method as a considerable advance. Weighing a large brown bear requires a scale, a road and a degree of cooperation from the bear. Counting the internet requires none of these and produces a figure to five significant digits.
The unit is the vote. Backpack exceeds 910 by 5,091 of them. In the semi-finals, 910 exceeded her own opponent by more than 70,000, while Backpack scraped past his by 4,100. The bracket therefore records a runner-up who was overwhelmingly fatter than a bear who was, in turn, very nearly as fat as the champion.
Body fat does not normally behave this way. Under the voting method it does, because the quantity being measured is not the bear.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes a further advantage of the system. A bear that gains no weight at all may still win, provided enough people believe otherwise, and a bear that doubles in size may lose on turnout.
No animal stood on a scale at any point in the 2026 competition. Backpack is the fattest bear in Alaska because 103,344 people said so, and the salmon had nothing to do with it.