Gazelle Traveled Distance of Nearly Half Earth’s Circumference in Five Years

Over the course of nearly five years, a female gazelle in Mongolia completed a remarkable journey of at least 18,000 kilometers . It crossed frozen rivers, encountered oil fields, negotiated fenced boundaries with China and Russia and trekked 900 kilometers just to survive two months of one particularly brutal winter, according to a new study.

More than half of the world’s gazelles of the species P. gutturosa live on Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe, says wildlife ecologist Nandintsetseg Dejid of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Germany, who led the new study. In October 2014 Dejid and her colleagues outfitted 14 Mongolian gazelles with lithium-battery-powered GPS collars that transmitted location signals every 23 hours and provided up to a few years of data. But a 15th gazelle—the individual highlighted in the new study—received a solar-powered GPS collar that outperformed the others and enabled the new findings.

The gazelle’s remarkable ramble contrasts sharply with the extremely predictable seasonal movements of mule deer herds studied by wildlife ecologist Matthew Kauffman of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. One mule deer among a group in Wyoming migrated about 250 kilometers along a familiar corridor from its winter range to its summer range, Kauffman and his colleagues reported in 2019.

In some cases, the inability to make long trips can result in die-offs among migrating mammals—which occurred to Cape springbok in the Karoo region of South Africa at the end of the 19th century—or contribute to the eradication of a species, Kauffman and his co-authors wrote in their 2021 paper.

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