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Voting begins in Alaska’s Fat Bear Week contest after one grizzly killed another on video
Voting opened Wednesday for the super-sized grizzlies in the running to win the 2024 Fat Bear Week contest, after one animal’s graphic on-camera death delayed the event.
Now in its 10th year, Fat Bear Week is an annual competition of sorts that allows viewers around the world to tune into a series of livestreams starring several brown bears that roam Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska. Stretched across the wilderness on the Alaskan peninsula, Katmai is home to some of the region’s largest grizzly bears, which come each year to the Brooks River for its seasonal salmon run.
With the feeding season nearing its end, and months of hibernation on the horizon, the bulkiest creatures in the national park are celebrated during Fat Bear Week for their hunting successes. Fans can cast votes online for the grizzlies in contention to join the competition’s Hall of Champions this year, with the most favored bears progressing through multiple rounds until just one is crowned the victor.
Fat Bear Week kicked off Wednesday and will continue through Oct. 8, known as Fat Bear Tuesday, as organizers of the contest host digital chats about Katmai and the bears themselves. The National Park Service partners with the nonprofit Explore.org to put on the weeklong event, as the organization streams intimate footage of the contenders on its website.
Bears are technically “pitted against each other” as Katmai park rangers place them in brackets typical of traditional sports tournaments, the park service writes in a description of Fat Bear Week on its site.
“People may vote using any criteria they see fit,” the description reads. “In the end, one bear with reign supreme.”
Organizers of the 2024 Fat Bear Week contest postponed their bracket reveal earlier this week after an on-camera fight between two bears at the mouth of the Brooks River led to the death of one of the animals. Known as Bear 402, a former Fat Bear Week contestant, the older female grizzly was killed by a male, known as Bear 469, Monday morning. Mike Fritz, the resident naturalist at Explore.org, and Sarah Bruce, a Katmai park ranger, suggested in an online discussion held instead of the reveal that the male appeared to drown the “beloved” female, although they were not sure why the brawl began.
“National parks like Katmai protect not only the wonders of nature, but also the harsh realities,” the National Park Service’s Matt Johnson said in a statement to CBS News after Bear 402 was killed. “Each bear seen on the webcams is competing with others to survive.”
This year’s bracket consists of 11 massive grizzly bears. The lineup was eventually unveiled Tuesday evening.
The House Ethics Committee, which has been conducting an investigation into sexual misconduct and obstruction allegations against Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, scheduled a vote for Friday on whether to release its report, according to three sources with knowledge of the committee’s work.
Hours after President-elect Donald Trump said he planned to nominate Gaetz to be attorney general, Gaetz resigned his congressional seat, effective immediately.
“I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress, to pursue the position of Attorney General in the Trump Administration,” Gaetz said in his resignation letter obtained by CBS News
House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that there was about an eight-week period during which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis could fill his seat by setting the date for a special election.
Now that Gaetz has resigned, it is unclear whether the panel will vote on releasing the report, since Gaetz is no longer in Congress.
There is precedent in Congress on the Senate side for an ethics committee report to become public after a member resigns from Congress, however. In 2011, this happened when Sen. John Ensign of Nevada resigned amid allegations that he tried to hide an extramarital affair.
But it’s not clear that that would apply to the House, leaving open the possibility that the report on Gaetz would not be released.
In June, the House Ethics Committee released a statement saying it was investigating a range of allegations against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and bribery.
Multiple sources at the time told CBS News that four women had informed the House Ethics Committee that they had been paid to go to parties that included sex and drugs, and that Gaetz had also attended. The committee has Gaetz’s Venmo transactions that allegedly show payments for the women.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has called the committee’s investigation a “frivolous” smear campaign.
Some of the allegations of sexual misconduct under review by the committee were also the subject of a previous Department of Justice probe into Gaetz. Federal investigators sought to determine if Gaetz violated sex trafficking and obstruction of justice laws, but no charges were filed.
The House Ethics Committee resumed its investigation into Gaetz in 2023, following the Justice Department’s decision not to pursue charges against him.
Gaetz has long blamed then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, also a Republican, for the probe. And Gaetz later led the movement to sack McCarthy as speaker.
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