Nature
Arctic terns weigh under 125 grams, yet a 2010 tracking study found some of them flew more than 80,000 kilometers in a single year of migration.
ILLUSTRATION · AIA 2010 study found some Arctic terns travel more than 80,000 kilometers a year on migration.
C. Egevang and colleagues fitted 11 Arctic terns, birds weighing under 125 grams, with miniature 1.4-gram geolocators. Their results appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some individuals traveled more than 80,000 kilometers annually. The tracking confirmed the terns' main wintering region in the Southern Ocean and revealed a previously unknown stopover area in the North Atlantic used by birds from Greenland and Iceland.
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