Lakewood Ranch High School teacher Tana Phelps brought a 1,200-pound brown bear into her AP Environmental Science classroom during the week of Sept. 22. Not literally, but close enough.

Phelps used Fat Bear Week, an annual online competition run by Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve, as a teaching tool for her students. The public votes for its favorite brown bear each fall. This year's contest ended Sept. 29 with Bear 89, nicknamed "Backpack," winning the 2026 title.

"Bear week is important because it makes the general human population excited about bears," Phelps told the school's Mustangs Ahead publication in a Sept. 30 article. "If anything threatens the national park, people are going to be more adamant about wanting to protect our natural environment."

Phelps directed students to the National Park Service website and fatbearsweek.org to follow the bears and learn more about their habitat.

A bear named Backpack

The competition drew roughly 2.5 million votes from around the world, according to WEAU. That is up from more than 1.7 million the previous year.

Backpack, about 20 years old, beat Bear 910 in the final round by 5,091 votes, 103,344 to 98,253. Katmai park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated he weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds, Alaska Public Media reported.

The bear earned his name as a cub by riding on his mother's back through the Brooks River instead of swimming alongside her. His mother, Bear 435 "Holly," won Fat Bear Week in 2019.

It was Backpack's first championship. He overcame a leg injury as a yearling in 2007 that left park staff questioning whether he would survive, according to Popular Science.

In the classroom

Fat Bear Week started in 2014 as a one-day Facebook event called "Fat Bear Tuesday" that drew fewer than 1,700 votes. Twelve years later, it has become a global phenomenon. The National Park Service offers free classroom extension resources tied to the competition, covering healthy ecosystems, salmon and brown bears across multiple grade levels.

For Phelps, the appeal is straightforward: a viral competition that gets students invested in real wildlife and conservation questions. The bears bulk up on salmon to build the fat reserves they need to survive winter hibernation, providing students a window into the relationship among salmon, brown bears and Katmai's broader ecosystem.