Fat Bear Week is back. Choose your bruin carefurly!

KATMAI NATIONAL PARK & PRESERVE, Alaska (WSYX) — Winter is coming but first is the most wonderful time of the year: Fat Bear Week.

Each year, the folks at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska gift us with battling rotund brown bears, each fattening up before the long sleep of winter hibernation. This is the 10th year.

The competition is arranged NCAA basketball tournament-style, pitting the hungry ursids' appetites against one another in a fight to see who can pack the biggest ponch.

The competition opens on Wednesday and voting can be done by clicking or tapping here and following the prompts.

Choose the fattest bear of the year! Some of the largest brown bears on Earth make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska," the park said on its website. "Brown bears get fat to survive and Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament celebrating their success in preparation for winter hibernation."

The beefy bruins compete in a single-elimination format. A vote for a bear is an endorsement of its embodiment of "fatness." While it might seem judgmental (it is), the competition is really about winter preparedness.

Adult male bears average 700–900 pounds in mid-summer. In late summer and fall, the biggest males often weigh more than 1,200 pounds. Adult female bears average smaller than adult males by one-third to one-half, largely due to the energetic costs of raising cubs," Explore.org says.

Scroll through the gallery above to see your 2023 contestants:

• 32 Chonk
• 128 Grazer
• 151 Walker
• 164 Bucky Dent
• 284 Electra
• 402
• 428
• 435 Holly
• 480 Otis
• 747
• 901

Follow the progress of each of the contestants on the Katmai National Park Facebook page until one bear joins the "Hall of Chompions."