Chunk, a 1,200-pound bear with a broken jaw, wins Alaska's popular Fat Bear Week contest

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Chunk, a towering brown bear with a broken jaw, swept the competition Tuesday in the popular Fat Bear Week contest — his first win after narrowly finishing in second place three previous years.

The annual online competition allows viewers to follow 12 bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve on live webcams and cast ballots in a bracket-style, single-elimination tournament that lasts a week. Chunk — known officially as Bear 32 — beat out Bear 856, who doesn't have a nickname, in the final bracket, according to totals posted on the organizers' website.

Contest organizers estimated Chunk's weight at 1,200 pounds. While organizers do not weigh individual bears during the contest because of safety concerns, Chunk and others had their density scanned in the past using laser technology called LIDAR to bolster weight estimates.

"Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River," said Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org. Fitz said Chunk likely hurt his jaw in a fight with another bear.

The contest is wildly popular. This year, it attracted more than 1.5 million votes from fans who watched the ursines gorge on a record run of fall salmon as they fished in the Brooks River about 300 miles from Anchorage.

It is the greatest glut of salmon in the living memories of the bears and the humans who have run the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014, according to Katmai Conservancy spokesperson Naomi Boak.

That abundance "decreased conflict in the river since salmon were readily available," Boak said in an email. In Tuesday's announcement, Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated about 200,000 salmon made their way up Brooks River.

In leaner years, the toughest bears jockey for the best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, where the salmon converge in a bottleneck and leap from the water as they fight their way upstream to spawn.

This year, Brooks Falls fishing spots were often empty as bears hunted up and down stream. At one point Monday, one of the explore.org live cameras showed two people calmly casting fishing rods along the river, even as brown bears plodded upstream and downstream from them.

Voters in the online contest could review before and after photos of the bears, lean at the start of summer and fattened at the end. Some fans choose their favorite based on looks or backstory.

The live cameras at Brooks Falls captured the moments last year when Bear 128's cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into the fishing spot occupied by Chunk, who attacked and injured the cub. The mother bear, also known as Grazer, fought Chunk but the cub ultimately died. After the dramatic fight, voting fans handed Grazer a victory over Chunk.

Fat Bear Week was started in 2014 as an interactive way to inform the public about brown bears, the coastal cousins of grizzlies. They spend summers catching and eating as many salmon as possible so they can fatten up for hibernation in Alaska's cold, lean winters.