After being reminded that I haven't posted in several months, I think it's time to chat about another cool science article I found. Not sure who of you read this thing, but I like science and so should you!
Migration. It's one of these cool phenomena where animals breed and winter in different areas of the country, continent or world. Birds are of course, well known for their migration patterns. We even have a federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act to help protect areas where these birds travel and rest allow their way. Artic terns travel about 24,000 kilometers every year as they travel from Antarctica to Greenland, which they do in about 40 days as they take stops and eat along the way.
Well, a recent study by Gill et al (2009) just demonstrated that a small-ish nondescript shorebird, the bar-tailed godwit, now holds the record for longest, non-stop flight.
These adorable little guys travel from Alaska to New Zealand, across the entire Pacific ocean, a total of around 11,000km in about 8 days. The kind folks at USGS already made this map up:
What makes it even more impressive, is that these little monsters aren't gliders, they're flappers. They flap their little wings nonstop for about 192 hours.
Holy smokes, that's impressive! Another commentary highlighted this article and discussed how on earth is this physically possible? Well apparently godwits have the perfect combination of several factors: they fly fast, their shape gives them the perfect Reynold's number (which sort of measures how turbulent their flight wakes are) and they have a fairly low metabolism allowing them to sustain for that amount of time without eating.
What I wonder is, how do these guys sleep? Do they sleep? How do they navigate? And why the heck do they go so far!
Gill et al. 2009. Extreme endurance flights by landbirds crossing the Pacific Ocean: ecological corridor rather than barrier? Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276:443-457.
