February 18th, 2012 10:38pm

Arctic foxes are incredible:

As far back as the late 1940s, Laurence Irving and Per Scholander, two pioneers in comparative physiology working at the US navy’s Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow, Alaska, attempted to measure the cold tolerance of different species, using the point at which shivering begins to indicate environmental stress. Arctic ground squirrels succumbed at 8 °C and polar bear cubs at 0 °C, but when the scientists came to test Arctic foxes, their equipment could not generate temperatures cold enough to register a result. They eventually had two of the hardy animals flown to a more sophisticated facility in Washington DC, where shivering was finally observed after they had been exposed to -70 °C for an hour.

They’ve also been known to spend up to 5 months in one stretch on the ice where nobody knows what they eat, they’ve been seen less than 40 miles from the pole and after these extended trips manage to find their way back to where they came from! On constantly shifting ice!

All the above stolen from New Scientist.

hikergirl:

This made me chuckle. 

Doug Allan filming Arctic Fox, Svalbard, Norway.

Picture: DOUG ALLAN/NPL/REX (via Freeze Frame: Doug Allan’s images of wildlife in some of the world’s coldest places - Telegraph)