Across the ice sheets of Norway's Svalbard Islands to northern Canada, a young Arctic fox’s lengthy journey has left researchers “speechless,” according to Greenland's Sermitsiaq newspaper. The tiny creature walked approximately 2,176 miles (3,506 km) in just 76 days, or about 28.5 miles per day on average, a pace faster than any fox has previously been recorded traveling at.
The young female fox, which is just under a year old, was fitted with a GPS tracking device by scientists at Norway's Polar Institute. She was then freed into the wild on March 26, 2018, on the east coast of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard archipelago's main island. The Norwegian Svalbard Islands are located about halfway between the North Pole and Norway. All of these islands experience an arctic climate.
Spitsbergen is the largest and the only permanently settled island in the archipelago. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean, the Greenland Sea and the Norwegian Sea.
The young fox set off west along the sea ice in search of food, and 21 days and 939 miles (1,512 kilometers) later, she landed in Greenland on April 16, 2018. She was then tracked making her way to Canada's Ellesmere Island, only 76 days after leaving Svalbard. The Polar Institute produced a graph that creates the epic journey of the fox.
An Arctic fox surprises researchers with an epic run across polar ice from Svalbard to Canada arctictoday.com/an-arctic-fox-… By Eva Fuglei & Arnaud Tarroux #Arctic fox dispersal from #Svalbard to #Canada: one female’s long run across sea ice polarresearch.net/index.php/pola…
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It was not the length of the journey, but the speed with which the fox had covered it that most amazed the scientists.
"We couldn't believe our eyes at first. We thought perhaps it was dead, or had been carried there on a boat, but there were no boats in the area. We were quite thunderstruck," Polar Institute Researcher Eva Fuglei told NRK, Norway's public broadcaster.
The young fox logged the highest speed over the glaciers in Greenland, but she also maintained an impressive average speed while she was on the sea ice, which may indicate that she used the ice as "means of transport," according to the study’s report.
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The fox took two longer breaks along its journey. The researchers suspect there may be several reasons for these stops, including an inhospitable climate and difficulty finding food sources. Snowstorms and difficult terrain may have also played a role during these periods of less movement, Fuglei explained.
"There's enough food in the summer, but it gets difficult in winter. This is when the Arctic fox often migrates to other geographical areas to find food to survive. But this fox went much further than most others we've tracked before -- it just shows the exceptional capacity of this little creature," Fuglei said, reports BBC News.
Sea ice played a key role in the fox's ability to migrate between these areas, meet other populations and find food. The sea and land ice allowed the fox to travel across continents. In recent years, sea ice has shrunk in the Arctic due in part to the warmer climate, which can have serious consequences for wildlife, according to the researchers.
This journey is another example of how important sea ice is to wildlife in the Arctic, said Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment Ola Elvestuen. The warming in the north is occurring very fast. We must cut emissions quickly to prevent the sea ice from disappearing all summer, she added.
Fuglei, together with researcher Arnaud Tarroux from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), conducted the study, which was published in the Norwegian Polar Institute’s journal Polar Research on June 24, 2019.
The study is the first documentation to show in detail that an Arctic fox has migrated between different continents and ecosystems in the Arctic. It is also one of the longest walks ever documented for an Arctic fox in such a short time.
On Feb. 6, 2019, the satellite transmitter stopped working so the researchers no longer know where the fox is located, according to the Polar Institute.
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