Every year many animals travel thousands of kilometres to feed and mate. We look at some of the most remarkable journeys.
Read more: Long haul: How butterflies and moths go the distance
Arctic tern
Birds are the most well-known migratory animals, and the world champion is the Arctic tern, .
Every year they fly from their summer homes in Greenland and Iceland all the way to the Weddell Sea, off the coast of Antarctica. Because they take a detour en route, they sometimes travel up to 81,600 kilometres in the course of a year.
The Arctic tern does have one big advantage: it is a seabird, so it can feed during its long journey. Land birds have no such luck…
(Image: Ann & Steve Toon / SplashdownDirect / Rex Features)
Bar-tailed godwit
The toughest of several subspecies of is Limosa lapponica baueri – sadly not named for 24‘s Jack Bauer – which travels from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand.
Because it is a land bird it cannot feed over the sea, so it makes a in just six to eight days. This is the longest non-stop flight, and the longest journey without pausing to feed, by any animal.
To complete the trip they , apparently to save weight, and rebuild them afterwards.
A argues that the godwit’s record is unlikely to be broken, simply because there is only so much planet Earth to fly over.
(Image: Delfino/Sunset/Rex Features)
Humpback whale
Among mammals, the record for the longest migration is held by the . It spends the summer , then heads to warmer tropical waters to raise its young over the winter.
The population with the strongest wanderlust spends its winters off the coast of Antarctica and migrates north to Costa Rica – a distance of 8300 kilometres.
Northern elephant seals clock up more kilometres with yearly journeys of 20,000 kilometres, but this is because they travel between the California coast and their Pacific feeding grounds .
Male humpbacks sing as they swim, perhaps to woo females. The males alter the pitch of their songs to ensure that they are heard over the greatest possible distance. They also slow down, prolonging their journeys and giving them the chance to mate with as many females as possible. For their part, the .
(Image: SplashdownDirect/Mike Phimister/Rex Features)
Leatherback turtle
Sea turtles are exceptional among reptiles in being champion migrators.
In 2008 a was , heading eastwards from a nesting beach on Papua, Indonesia, to a feeding ground off the coast of Oregon and back again. This amounted to a journey of at least 20,558 kilometres, the longest reptile migration on record. Loggerheads , some from Costa Rica to the south Pacific.
As if that wasn’t enough, leatherbacks swim at depths of over 600 metres, deeper than any other reptile and follow the contours of underwater mountain ranges and continental slopes.
(Image: Michael Duva/Getty)
Christmas Island red crab
When the monsoon rains come, changes in the levels of a hormone trigger a sugar rush in which causes them to to the coast. They cover about 700 metres a day and reach the shore in 9 to 18 days.
Because they breathe through gills and , the crabs are . However, a shows that every year they radically redesign their muscles, increasing their endurance to cope with the journey.
(Image: Sue Flood/Getty)
Caribbean spiny lobster
spends much of the year in the shallow coastal waters of the west Atlantic, where they , until . This seems to be their signal to move to deeper water.
They form up into containing many tens of individuals, with each lobster touching the one in front with its antennae, and set off across the seabed. They often travel several kilometres before halting and resuming their solitary lives.
Like many birds, the lobsters – a trick that has inspired the design of robots that do the same thing.
(Image: Mark Webster/Getty)
Giant honeybee
is an aggressive species of bee found in south-east Asia. The colonies , probably to .
As well as the familiar food-related waggle dances seen in many bees, they use to ensure they all go the right way.
The swarms return to the same nesting sites each year, even though all the worker bees that originally picked the sites have died long before. It has been suggested that , but so far .
(Image: Bksimonb/CC 2.0)
Blue wildebeest
live in vast herds in east Africa, most famously on the plains of the Serengeti in Tanzania and Kenya, where they number over a million.
Their annual migration, together with hundreds of thousands of gazelles and zebras, is probably the largest mass movement of land animals on the planet – although a similar mass migration of kob, tiang and gazelle in southern Sudan might give it a run for its money.
Their is sometimes called the “circular migration”, because they make a following the .
They are tracked by predators like lions and hyenas, eager to feed on any animal that struggles to keep up.
(Image: Johnson/iStock)
