Record hike of an arctic fox: 3,500 km from Norway to Canada
The long trip of the fox, which was put on a pager in July 2017, started in Spitsbergen on March 26, 2018 and, after traveling 1,512 kilometers on the Arctic ice, was located in Greenland, and from there it continued to the Canadian island of Ellesmere, where it arrived on July 1.
In total, therefore, the animal covered a distance of 3,506 kilometers, explained the experts of the Norwegian Polar Institute, who said that the total is stretched even up to 4,415 kilometers if the detected was added until it left the Norwegian island.
This is the first time that the movement of an arctic fox between several continents and ecosystems of the Arctic is verified and is "one of the longest walks ever documented for a fox (of that species) in such a short time," said the institute. Norwegian.
The tracking of the fox showed that it initially traveled long stretches of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and then on Greenland glaciers, with an average speed of 46 kilometers per day.
But it reached its highest speed on the ice in an area of the interior of Greenland, where it came to cover a distance of 155 kilometers in a day.
The northernmost location in which this Arctic fox female was detected was 84.7 degrees North.
Although at first it was thought that someone could have removed the locator to the animal given the incredible distance he had traveled, researcher Eva Fuglei, of the aforementioned institute, said that the idea was rejected because "there are no boats that sail so far north between the ice".
However, the researchers have had to settle for the data that allowed them to follow the animal to Canada since the locator stopped transmitting its signal last February.
Source: EFE.
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