New Cheating Scandal Swallows Fat Bear Week Tourney At Alaska’s Katmai National Park

Cheating isn’t just for chess, it’s apparently also an issue in the surprisingly competitive world of obese osos otherwise known as Fat Bear Week (FBW).

On Sunday Alaska’s Katmai National Park announced via Twitter that its popular poll to crown the crowd favorite of the park’s most massive non-marine mammals (apologies to all whales) had been spammed.

FBW is a tournament style single-elimination competition in which the public can visit the Explore.org site to vote for their preferred bear as some of the celebrity salmon-swipers of Katmai’s over 2,000 resident bears go head-to-head over the course of several days.

“480 “Otis” was back early this season, looking prime to take on the competition once again,” reads a statement from the park to kick off FBW. “Can 747 or 435 “Holly” reclaim the title they had in years past? Is there a dark horse (er, brown bear) in the race that can upend the trophy winners like 128 “Grazer,” 32 “Chunk,” or 151 “Walker” all trying to claim a maiden victory?”

So you get the tone of the whole thing. A total boat-load of PBS-style educational punny fun. With literally nothing actually at stake, it’s certainly weird that someone would send the bots to stuff the digital ballot box for Unnamed Bear 747.

After 747’s high-flying vote total was adjusted to account for several thousand clearly fraudulent votes, according to park officials, the win in the semi-final round was given instead to Holly (Bear 435).

This would all seem to bolster Elon Musk’s infamous complaints about the true number of bots on Twitter. Not to mention the increasing sense that cheaters are everywhere, from chess to poker… and let’s not even breach the topic of politics where accusations fly freely on all sides.

But perhaps even more entertaining than the latest attempt at cheating in obscure competitions is the Brooks Falls live webcam in Katmai National Park, which provides an intriguing window into how these bears get so fat in the first place.

After about fifteen minutes of watching the highlight reel from the stream, this location seems to be the Ursa equivalent of an all-inclusive resort where large groups of bears laze around in the water just waiting for salmon to literally jump into their mouths. After they get their fill, they retire to sleep until spring.

If any bears out there are looking for a co-author for a self-help book, I think you all are really onto something that needs to be shared with the (over)working world. Hit me up.