Meet Otis, the Fattest Bear

Otis the undergo is one shapely half-ton of fur and blubber, and for the 2nd year in a row, he’s the winner of Katmai Nationwide Park’s Burly Undergo Championship.

What makes a champion? If you are 480 Otis the undergo, it is patience, abilities, and a number of thousand salmon.

Every drop, rangers in Alaska’s Katmai Nationwide Park pit the park’s brown bears against every utterly different in a March Madness-fashion bracket, monitoring the bruins as they gorge themselves on fish and pack on winter weight. A week, the fattest bears (as sure by a vote) come, till handiest one ultra-tubby champ remains.

For the bears, nonetheless, their drop feasting is the relaxation nonetheless a recreation. Brown bears in Katmai can lose up to a 3rd of their weight over the route of the winter. In preserving with the Index of Mammalian Species, bears could well maybe additionally lengthen hibernation if they can not build on adequate paunch, waiting till low temperatures and snow power them into their dens; if they flee out of rotund reserves and wake up early, they face a fight for survival in the cool, handy resource-wretched Alaskan winter.

480 Otis’s victory is necessary for his age. At 20, Otis is extinct. (Male bears can live up to about 25 in the wild.) His final teeth are ground the total fashion down to stubs, and he’s no longer powerful adequate to scenario the park’s supreme bears.

But what Otis lacks in power, he makes up for in patience. Nicknamed “the Zen Grasp” by park workers, Otis’s modus operandi is to stake out a fishing hole on the Brooks River and place there, unmoving, for hours.

“Otis conserves energy by sitting in one place all day, every so continually even dozing on the job while he fishes,” wrote park officials on Katmai’s Facebook page. “His high energy economy helps to change into salmon into the most quantity of lard around his belly.” 

While the park would no longer delight in an legitimate figure for Otis’s weight, rangers estimate he punches in at a hefty 1,000 kilos.

Otis’s success came boring in existence. Following a number of lean years, Otis won his first Burly Undergo Tuesday Championship in 2014. He went on to repeat in 2016, narrowly defeating 435 Holly, “the Queen of Bass.”

Originally posted 2018-02-13 22:50:18.