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Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek
- euroclydon 7y agoIt’s even more impressive when you consider she was rubbing her shoulder on the ground the entire 2,700 miles trying to get the transponder to come off.
- sitzkrieg 7y agoSurely they checked to see how tolerant the fox was before blindly letting it go
- dnate 7y agoI couldn't find that info anywhere in the text so I assume it's a remark trying to point out a problematic animal-abuse like aspect of this research. Which I do not see
- amluto 7y agoSurely you mean that she checked several social media feeds on the smartphone she was outfitted with every half mile. And that at least five ad companies and twenty trackers followed her journey, none of which correctly deduced that she was a fox.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoIt's true what they say then. On the internet, nobody knows you're a fox.
- hirundo 7y agoCompare the fox's journey of 2,176 miles in 76 days to the average Pacific Crest Trail through hiker's 2,660 miles in 152 days. That's 29 vs 18 miles per day. The PCT record is about 50 miles per day. So an athletic human could have kept up with this canine. Of course the humans don't have to scavenge their meals along the way and the fox doesn't have to carry supplies. Typically dog companions don't do well on such long hikes. So while we can't keep up with migrating fish or birds at least we can potentially keep pace with a fox 1/8th of our size. Yay team. We're bred with the talent to keep on truckin.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIt's pretty cold up there and the fox didn't have a sleeping bag or tent :-)
- hirundo 7y agoJust a thick fur coat.
- aksss 7y agoWhich a primate can fashion out of multiple foxes.
- treebeard901 7y agoHave to catch them first...
- gambiting 7y agoWell but that's the thing - we can out walk a vast majority of animals on this planet. Early human hunters were successful partially because they could chase their prey for days if needed until it collapsed from exhaustion. We might have not have the same speed as some of the animals, but human endurance is unparalleled in the animal world.
- latch 7y agoUnparalleled in the _land_ animal world perhaps. But there are stories of birds that fly for months at a time. Penguins (in water), ostrich's and camels can also achieve pretty unparalleled things wrt endurance. And who knows about things in the sea...
- nradov 7y agoHuman endurance is unparalleled in the animal world when the temperature is high. At low temperatures some canids and horses can do as well or better, but they can't shed heat efficiently.
- netcraft 7y agoI don't understand why articles like this cant have a map? id argue almost every news article should have a map, giving it context locally, regionally and globally. But especially when you're talking about a crazy trek, even if it was just two points on a map - context is king.
- rb808 7y agoDoes the bbc now have the modern clickbait intensifier generator as well? something that randomly adds "speechless", "your draw will drop", "what they dont want you to know" etc etc
- JadeNB 7y agoI was going to point out that 'speechless' is a quote, but it appears to be just a (translated) quote from the linked article, not from the scientists themselves. Still, it's at least quoting someone else's clickbait.
- daniel_iversen 7y agoWow, I assumed that there was so much water surrounding Greenland that it would be impossible for a fox to swim or get there by themselves. Any idea how much of the path to Greenland from the poles and Canada is covered by ice and how far is pure water?
- Scaevolus 7y agoHere's the sea ice extent this year: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2019/04/Figure1.png http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2019/04/Figure1.png
- daniel_iversen 7y agoFascinating! Thanks a lot!
- daveslash 7y agoI wonder if there are any walking-creatures (as opposed to bird) that cross between northern Russia and northern Canada.
- tedunangst 7y agoThe article also says Iceland is connected by ice? > The shrinking of the polar ice pack is having an impact on Arctic foxes - they can no longer visit Iceland, for example When was Iceland regularly connected by ice?
- pvaldes 7y agoYou don't need a regular connection or a solid bridge, just a ship. Ice ship is fine. Human ship will work also.
- tanakachen 7y agoIt’s fascinating to see. But what about the plastic pollution as a result of this (from the GPS tracker that will now become permanent plastic garbage). I don’t mean to say the pollution isn’t worth the fox study. But why isn’t anyone asking if it is? Who determines, or at which point do we say, yes this study is worth creating this amount of pollution?
- perfmode 7y agoyou are asking.
- tanakachen 7y agoIt’s sad that I’m the only one
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- PhantomGremlin 7y agoBut what about the plastic pollution as a result of this (from the GPS tracker that will now become permanent plastic garbage). You need a little perspective about the true extent of the problem. A GPS tracker probably weights 4 ounces. For comparison, the Yangtze river alone dumps 1.5 million metric tons of plastic per year into the Yellow Sea. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/?redirect=1 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
- jussij 7y agoOr the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that make up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: https://earthsky.org/earth/great-pacific-garbage-patch-bigger-than-thought https://earthsky.org/earth/great-pacific-garbage-patch-bigge...
- tanakachen 7y agoSome oceanic science experiments drop thousands of ocean drones into the oceans to track currents. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but how come nobody questions if it is worth it?
- Ididntdothis 7y agoThis makes me wonder: could a human who is totally attuned to this cold environment do the same thing at the same speed? This would mean not being able to get any supplies, carry clothing and tent if needed and basically live off the land. Can humans do that?
- jmheinkle 7y agoYes, speed runs of the PCT (with more mountainous terrain) at faster paces than this are common.
- oska 7y agoYour question reminded me of the purported efforts of one of the male children of the Lykov family (the family separated from civilisation in deep Siberia): > Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus...
- sandworm101 7y agoA few years ago I read travel by a man who spent a summer with nudists/naturists in Europe. His intention was a travel article about about the nudist subculture, but towards the end of summer he found himself hiking nude beside a frozen lake. "I didn't even feel the cold." The article then became about the ability of the human body to adapt. He realized that by wearing so many different types and layers of clothes we deny our natural ability to adapt.
- undershirt 7y agowould love to read this. can you remember the source?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- howdydoo 7y agoYou might also like: - Polar bear shot dead in Iceland I can't say that I would. I guess this is as good a place as any to ask – what's the value of interrupting the article halfway through to link me to other articles? It's something I expect from the likes of Buzzfeed, but now the BBC is doing it too. Did they think I'd get bored halfway through?
- jbob2000 7y agoTheir metrics are for “articles viewed”, not “articles that the reader read and enjoyed”. They don’t care if you get bored halfway through, they probably don’t even care if you read the article. As long as the numbers for the money metrics go up, they’re happy.
- Aromasin 7y agoThe BBC does not run ads, and as far as I'm aware does not use any sort of metric you described. It is tax-payer funded service. What they have been doing is copying "features" from other popular news websites, i.e. Buzzfeed, and been integrating them into their own. I appreciate the fact they copied the "suggested articles" feature. I just don't think they considered it long enough to question as to why other websites put the articles half way through and not at the bottom...
- SahAssar 7y agoWhile I generally agree with what you said, they do track metrics, and that is one part of how the BBC decides how to spend it's money. If their articles online got a 10th of the traffic they would probably get a lot less money to write those articles. Public service is only useful if people consume it even if it should not optimize for that metric alone (or even primarily).
- jbob2000 7y agoSo the people who fund them are happy to just have the money go into a hole and... then what? They definitely have metrics. How do they know which journalists are writing good articles? How do they know which topics to write about?
- a0-prw 7y agoIt's funny that when someone is said to be "speechless", they generally turn out to produce a lot of words.
- dalbasal 7y agoI wonder how f there's anything to eat on the ice. Otherwise, it's hard to fathom what drives these foxes to keep going deeper into the frozen desert without so much a a faint smell of game for weeks.
- lqet 7y agoRelated: I recently watched Werner Herzog's "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" (can highly recommend). At the end of the documentary, a Siberian hunter returns from his cabin to his home village for Christmas. I takes him an entire day by snowmobile in harsh Siberian winter conditions, and at the end he travels for several hours in total darkness. He does not make a single stop. His dog travels with him, but not on the snowmobile. He runs next to the snow mobile the entire trip. Finally, the hunter arrives at the village late in the evening. The dog doesn't even seem to be exhausted. He happily greets the hunter's family members, and a woman casually mentions "well, the dog must be hungry". They give him something to eat, and that's that. Needless to say, it left me deeply impressed.
- aliswe 7y agoHow can it gave trekked from spitsbergen, svalbard, to greenland?