KENAI — After putting his new winter body on display for the world at Katmai National Park and Preserve the past week, one of the park’s pudgiest Fat Bear Week contenders — Otis, bear 480 — was crowned this year’s winner on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The park service tweeted the announcement at 5 p.m. Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“The people have spoken! The portly patriarch of paunch preserved to pulverize the Baron of Beardonkadon in the final match of #FatBearWeek 2021,” the tweet said. “480 Otis can now boast a bevy of bests with this fourth first place finish. As we celebrate, like a true champ, 480 is still chowing down.”<\/p>\n
According to the park service, Otis was between 4 and 6 years old when he was first discovered at Katmai in 2001, making him one of the oldest bears of the bunch.<\/p>\n
The chunky bear has two missing canine teeth and a floppy right ear, but the patience he exhibits while fishing — not wasting his energy chasing salmon like many of his counterparts — has proved successful in his journey to Fat Bear stardom, the park service said. Otis took home the gold in 2014, 2016 and 2017 before winning Tuesday evening.<\/p>\n
In an earlier interview with the Clarion, Lian Law, the visual information specialist at the park, said Fat Bear Week is really a celebration of success for these animals and the ecosystem in which they live.<\/p>\n
She noted that in particular, the Katmai habitat has one of the healthiest sockeye runs in the world.<\/p>\n
USA Today reported that voter turnout broke even last year’s record of over 650,000 — this year more than 793,000 votes were cast.<\/p>\n
And as for all the rest of the estimated 2,200 bears who live in the park, there’s always next year.<\/p>\n
Reach reporter Camille Botello at camille.botello@peninsulaclarion.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" O, tis a hefty bear. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":746,"featured_media":76241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230,150],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-76240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/746"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76240"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=76240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}