
Scientists 'speechless' at Arctic fox's epic trek - Shivetya
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48824181
======
hirundo
Compare 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.

~~~
BRAlNlAC
Walking a trail isn’t the same as walking cross country. Humans aren’t very
good at off trail navigation.

~~~
jacobush
Most aren't. Some are.

~~~
jacquesm
It's scary how inept people are in general at navigation. Telling the time and
obtaining a rough compass heading by the position of the sun should be
something anybody can do but surprisingly few people can do this.

~~~
crispinb
Human navigation is cultural. Urban culture (for better or worse) tends to cut
people off from physical reality. Spend a few days with a Cape York indigenous
person and find out how amazingly good people can get at this.

John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone
interested in improving their navigation skills.

~~~
Buttons840
For those who don't know: The natives of the Cape York area speak a language
with no words for front, back, left, or right, they only have words for
compass directions. Thus, speaking their language forces you to be aware of
compass directions at all times.

See:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html)

~~~
hyperpallium
I wonder if they'd also be less ego-centric, given that they don't perceive
the world in terms of their orientation?

~~~
marci
How language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky:
[https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k](https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k)

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netcraft
I 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.

~~~
ars
They linked to it:
[https://giphy.com/gifs/Q67UV1IkG36cGlz1dd](https://giphy.com/gifs/Q67UV1IkG36cGlz1dd)

~~~
netcraft
ah, my apologies, maybe I missed that the first time. Thanks for sharing!

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lqet
Related: 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.

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a0-prw
It's funny that when someone is said to be "speechless", they generally turn
out to produce a lot of words.

------
howdydoo

      You might also like:
      
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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
Their 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
The 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
While 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).

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Ididntdothis
This 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?

~~~
oska
Your 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-
rus...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-
family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/)

~~~
sandworm101
A 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
would love to read this. can you remember the source?

------
daniel_iversen
Wow, 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
Here'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)

~~~
daveslash
I wonder if there are any walking-creatures (as opposed to bird) that cross
between northern Russia and northern Canada.

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rb808
Does 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
I 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.

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dalbasal
I 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.

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aliswe
How can it gave trekked from spitsbergen, svalbard, to greenland?

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euroclydon
It’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.

~~~
amluto
Surely 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
It's true what they say then. On the internet, nobody knows you're a fox.

------
tanakachen
It’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?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_But 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-
plas...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-
tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/?redirect=1)

~~~
tanakachen
Some 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?

~~~
chousuke
Perhaps because it's obvious enough that the drones are being used for
something useful (research) and also that the amount is so small they don't
even register compared to the sheer amount of actual waste that is being
constantly generated.

You'd probably have to do millions of there experiments to even show up on the
radar

