How far would you go for love?
If you’re a Western Grey Whale you might go a whooping 14,000 miles!
Hey everyone, Julia here for DNews
Many animals migrate.
Birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, all do it.
Lots of animals travel to greener pastures to mate or feed.
By far and away the most common reasons is to get the hell away from winter.
Most migrations are to areas of warmer climates for the winter and back North again for the
summer.
Not unlike your snow bird grandparents, animals are willing to go pretty far for fairer weather.
A recent study published in the journal of Biology Letters made quite a splash.
A team of researchers from the US and Russia tracked a Western Grey Whale for a while.
I mean.
A WHILE.
This whale, Varvara started from Russia's Sakhalin Island, where their feeding grounds
are and journeyed across the Pacific Ocean, down the West Coast of the United States all
the way to their breeding grounds off the coast of Baja, Mexico.The total milage she
racked up?
She swam right into the record books at almost 14,000 miles round trip.
Making it the longest mammal migration ever recorded!
But she’s not the only one willing to go the distance.
Caribou, also called reindeer, are found across the northern regions of North America, Europe
and Asia.
Some herds are really really big.
The Porcupine caribou herd is 169,000 animals large!
In the spring as the cold arctic tundras thaw, the caribou journey far northward to feed
on newly exposed grasses and plants.
And as the cold sets back in, they head back south to chow on lichens.
The journey can take as many as 1,600 miles each way, making it the longest land migration
for mammals.
No talk about migrations is complete without mentioning the monarch butterfly.
The Eastern population can fly over 3,000 miles to spend the winter in warmer weather
in Mexico.
Some can fly up to 50 miles a day!
Yet their population is in decline, mostly due to habitat destruction and changes in
climate.
They use a process called time compensated sun navigation to find their way.
Basically they use the position of the sun and the time of day as tools to keep them
going in the right direction throughout their long trip.
It may come as no surprise but birds fly the furthest.
The award for the longest bird migration ever goes to the tiny arctic tern.
It took a little while for scientists to figure this out.
Previously, the award went to a bigger bird, the sooty shearwater, who topped out at a
40,000 mile trip.
But as technology allowed for smaller tracking devices, researchers turned to ever smaller
birds.
The Arctic terns long journey starts in Greenland and every year, after a little zig-zagging
around, the bird winds up 44,000 miles away in Antarctica.
Another recent study published in the journal Biology Letters found one of the longest non-stop
flights for any bird.
The blackpoll warbler flies over 1,500 miles in one fell swoop.
Over two or three days, the songbird flies from the forests of New England and Canada
and heads to the Caribbean for the winter.
To prep for the long trip, a bird might pack on an extra 5 or 6 grams fat.
While bigger birds like the northern wheatear fly a little further, a researcher from York
University not involved in the study told Newsweek that “it’s more impressive”
that so small a bird like the blackpoll warbler can make it so far.
The longest non-stop flight of all however goes to the Alaskan bar-tailed godwit.
Over eight days, the bird will travel from Alaska to New Zealand.
An almost 7,000 mile trip with no breaks.
So how do birds travel so far?
How do they know where they’re going?
Well they are some how able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field.
Some researchers from the University of Oxford think that a magnetically sensitive protein
called cryptochrome that regulates circadian rhythms might be responsible.
As blue or green lights hit atoms it makes electrons spin in response to magnetic fields.
Weird right?