(CNN) – Two bears face off on Fat Bear Tuesday, just days after a cheating scandal disrupted Sunday’s semifinals.
Veteran champion 747 is challenged by rising star 901 in the finals of Fat Bear Week. Voting begins at 12:00 p.m. ET.
It might have been a different story for 747 if officials hadn’t discovered vote-tampering on Sunday.
“A Fat Bear Week scandal for the ages. Someone stuffed the ballot box!” Explore.org wrote on Twitter Sunday night. The organization runs Fat Bear Week in Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve, where brown bears congregate on the salmon-rich Brooks River before spending the winter.
Officials became suspicious when 747’s opponent, 435 Holly, was 6,000 votes behind in just hours, Explore.org’s Candice Rusch told CNN Travel via email.
“While not unusual, it is very unusual for a bear to come back this late in the day. We ended up finding just over 9,000 spam votes,” said Rusch.
There were also some spam votes for 747 “maybe to throw us off?”
Explore.org added a captcha function to the survey, which seems to be working.
“We don’t want to share too much about the process we used to weed out spam votes because we don’t want to teach spammers how to spam better,” Rusch said.
The fake votes were discarded and the votes from the previous days were reviewed.
The last bears are standing
In the end, 747 edged out 435 Holly, with 37,940 counted for 747 on the recount.
Now 747, the 2020 champion that shares its name with the legendary aircraft, takes on the up-and-coming newcomer 901.
She is a bitch who, if she conceives earlier this year, could return to Brooks River with her first litter next year. Does 901 eat for more than one? We will see.
She’s certainly putting on an impressive performance this Fat Bear Week, with a crucial loss on Monday to 128 Grazer, a defensive mother bear with “flashy blonde ears” who first emerged on the Brooks River scene as a young cub in 2005.
“Rising Star 901 with another landslide election day. Is there anything this girl can’t do?” Explore.org tweeted Monday.
The annual competition is “a way to celebrate the resilience, adaptability, and strength of Katmai’s brown bears,” according to the park’s website.
The 12 heavyweights have been training for the big event since emerging from hibernation, searching for salmon and other foods that nature provides in this park on the coast of Southwest Alaska.
Explore.org features colorful bios and informative before and after photos of the adorable (yet impressive) brown bear contestants on its website.
And unlike basketball’s March Madness, the public can actually participate in and influence this competition.
The CNN Wire
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