This stone cold fox just set a new land-speed record for the species by traveling more than 2,000 miles from Norway to Canada in just 76 days, according to stunned researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
But the epic trek didn’t take place all at once — it happened in three freezing-temp installments.
The arctic (or blue coastal) fox was fitted with a tracking device in 2017 — and departed from Spitsbergen in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago on March 26, 2018. After 21 days and almost 940 miles, it touched down in Greenland on April 16, 2018. Its journey then continued to Canada’s Ellesmere Island, where it arrived on July 1, 2018.
“We first did not believe it was true,” says Norwegian Polar Institute researcher Eva Fuglei, who resulting paper, “One female’s long run across sea ice,” was published Monday. “This is, to our knowledge, the fastest movement rate ever recorded for this species.”
Fuglei and co-author Arnaud Tarroux declare this fox trot to be among the longest ever recorded. It was so long, in fact, that they initially questioned whether the sly critter’s collar could have been removed — or maybe the fox even hopped a boat, The Guardian reports.
Norwegian Polar Institute/Arnaud TarrouxBecause of the huge amount of ground covered in such a short period of time, researchers suspect the fox used ice as a “means of transport.”
“The sea ice plays a key role in the fact that mountain foxes will migrate between areas, meet other populations and find food,” says Fuglei, noting that this is the first time the institute has documented the migration of the species between continents and ecosystems in the Arctic.
The fox’s journey has raised concerns about how climate change’s affect on sea ice could impact animals’ ability to migrate — and survive on “marine food resources.”
“This is another example of how important sea ice is to wildlife in the Arctic,” Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s Climate and Environment Minister, tells the Institute in a statement. “The warming in the north is frighteningly fast. We must cut emissions quickly to prevent the sea ice from disappearing all summer.”
