Pole-to-Pole Arctic Fern Trip Mapped

Most of you know that many species of birds do not spend their winters and summers at the same locations. They move about a lot, traveling thousands of miles to get to their destinations. Among the most known species to do so are albatrosses and godwits, but these large animals cannot even begin to try and match the performances of Arctic ferns. These birds, weighing on average less than 100 grams, travel a mind-boggling 70,000 kilometers (43,000 miles) in a single year, from Greenland to Antarctica. This year, researchers managed to track their migration patterns using GPS devices, BBC News reports.

As they leave Greenland, the birds head south alongside western Europe and northwestern Africa, and then split into two groups. The alternating routes take the creatures either alongside the rest of the African coastline, and then across the Indian and Antarctic Oceans to their destination, or across the Atlantic, and then over Brazil and South America, to the same location. In total, they traveled some 70,900 kilometers this year, putting to shame all other migratory birds. They leave the island in August or September, and return home in May or June. In the mean time, they spend five to six months in the Weddell Sea, on the shores of Antarctica.

“From ringing, we knew where the Arctic tern traveled. The new thing is that we've now been able to track the bird during a full year of migration, all the way from the breeding grounds to the wintering grounds and back again,” explains Greenland Institute of Natural Resources expert Carsten Egevang. Scientists from Greenland, Denmark, the United States, United Kingdom, and Iceland were involved in the study. The investigators attached small translocators (GPS devices) to the Arctic ferns, and were thus able to track the birds' journey across the planet.

“The use of these devices on seabirds is not only revolutionizing our understanding of migration patterns, but the resulting data on distribution also help address the requirement to identify important biological hotspots,” says British Antarctic Survey expert Richard Phillips. The study appears in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).