In a call with reporters Thursday night, the Department of the Interior said the workers who monitor the contest are not exempt from a lapse in appropriations. The majority of national parks will close to the public in the event of a shutdown.

The annual competition champions the Katmai bears as they complete their transformations from scrawny to massive for hibernation. With the internet watching via live bear cams, the contestants feast on the millions of sockeye salmon that run from Bristol Bay down the Brooks River. Then it’s up to voters to interpret the “fattest.”

On Friday morning, Mike Fitz, a resident naturalist with Explore.org and a former Katmai ranger who came up with Fat Bear Week in 2014, wrote in the webcam’s live chat that the competition will likely be postponed, especially if the shutdown lasts more than a day or two.

“While I remain confident that Fat Bear Week will happen this year, I am unsure if it’ll happen as currently scheduled,” he added.

Explore, the multimedia company that streams live footage of bears at Katmai plucking salmon out of Brooks River, is privately owned. The voting and bracket is hosted on Explore.org, but the contest relies on information from Katmai rangers who track the bears.

According to a news release from the National Park Service, rangers are responsible for creating the bracket-style tournament. Key park staff members who produce Fat Bear Week will be furloughed, and Fitz said there was no legal exemption that allows them to work during a shutdown.

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Fitz encouraged fans to help the situation by contacting their representatives in Congress. While the competition is getting attention, he said the shutdown impacts more people than bears, putting federal employees and park concession staff out of a paycheck. Fitz also called the shutdown a waste of taxpayer money and a detriment to the work of the parks.

“Right now, all over the nation, every national park is spending extraordinary amounts of staff time getting ready for a shutdown,” he said. “They are doing work that inhibits their ability to do their regular jobs.”

He noted that a backlog of work adds more strain on federal employees when they return to work. “None of the things on a ranger’s to do list goes away during a shutdown,” he said. “It just piles up more and hinders their ability to adequately protect parks.”

At Katmai National Park, rangers begin work on Fat Bear Week long before the competition begins. As soon as employees arrive at the beginning of the season, they are tasked with capturing photos of the bears at their lowest weight. They keep track of the bears throughout the summer, then come September must capture the bears at their fattest.

“The pictures we use for Fat Bear Week are not the kind of pictures that as a photographer, you normally want to take,” said Naomi Boak, the park’s media ranger.

Unlike the visitors hoping to get photos of the bears in action, Boak says rangers look for “boring profile shots” that give the online voters an idea of the bear’s size.

The job is easier said than done. With bears constantly submerged in the water fishing and appearing in the Brooks Corridor at inconsistent times, “the picture-taking gets intense,” Boak said.

September is also when the rangers start working on Fat Bear Week planning and production, mapping out the competition schedule and debating what bears will make the bracket. Part of that decision depends on whether they can get good photos of them skinny and fat.

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“And in the meantime we’re still doing Q&As in the [Explore.org live stream] chat and on YouTube, live chats and play-by-plays,” Boak added.

The work continues through the tournament. Festivities began on Sept. 29 with Fat Bear Junior. Media rangers field requests from press around the world — Boak said Fat Bear Week is also big in India — write marketing and social media copy, and publish four posts a day to promote the competition and keep the public updated.

“It’s a team effort like a writer’s room … we want it to be fun and funny and alliterative,” Boak said.

The biggest challenge may be finding new words for fat. “Thank god for the thesaurus,” Boak said. “It gets worn out.”