In Kaktovik, Alaska, everyone knows Fat Albert. He is a male polar bear weighing almost 680 kilos, far above the species average, and he walks so slowly that it seems as if every step requires an Olympic-level effort.
His secret is no mystery: local hunters tend to leave whale blubber and meat a few kilometers from the village, and Fat Albert discovered that this free buffet is much more convenient than chasing seals across the ice. So while other polar bears grow thinner because of the melting Arctic ice, he found a way to live like a king without moving a muscle more than necessary.
He isn’t the heaviest polar bear ever recorded —that title belongs to a specimen hunted in 1960 that reached 1.000 kilos—, but ever since photographer Edward Boudreau photographed him, Fat Albert has become an unwitting celebrity of the Arctic. An irony with legs: amid the climate crisis, there is a bear that decided to solve the problem by eating too much.