A lone wolf's miles traveled in northern Minnesota | Hacker News Reader

A lone wolf's miles traveled in northern Minnesota

brilliantmaps.com

93 pointsbookofjoe16 comments

96.5 MB GIF ahead warning.

(I'm both impressed and scared of how I used up 1% of my generous mobile data plan in about 5 seconds by clicking 1 link.)

Is 10GB a generous mobile data plan these days? I guess it really depends on where you are. In Taiwan I used to have unlimited one years ago already. Now in England they just start to come out with unlimited plans that are not totally ridiculously overpriced, so I guess things are getting better.

But yeah, while my first thought was "95MB is not that much", it is also 4x the size of the hard drive of my first computer, so yeah, suddenly can relate that it is not totally expected either. (and these views definitely date me).

Minnesota is BIG! Earlier this year an Arctic fox was tracked walking 3500 km (~2000 miles) in 76 days from Spitsbergen (Norway) to Ellesmere island (Canada) over the Arctic ice[1]. I thought that was a long way.

1. https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/arctic-fox-travels-3-500-km-....

It's cumulative travel, not straight-line distance.

Amazing as per the data, once the fox walked 150 kilo meters in a single day.

That's covering one marathon distance everyday!

Here's another map from the same project that shows multiple different wolves and how they stay within their territories: https://i.redd.it/6ddoli58r1v21.gif

Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/bol3rj/oc_...

It's interesting that the movements sometimes look like a random walk, but also there's definitely movements that look purposeful. I wonder what's the underlying reason for the change in the two apparent movement states (mostly random, purposeful). Of course it could always just be a random walk, but it doesn't look very likely.

This one was interesting:

Q (thechrizzo): Close to the end there is this straight line from bottom to top… What was that? The wolf walking a straight line for miles? Kinda strange

A: The wolf was running down a power line that is a compacted snowmobiled trail during the winter. This trail allowed the wolf to travel in a straight line for a a good distance!

It's funny how the laws of Brownian motion seem to apply here (molecular collisions vs trees) and to have the same effect (minus the straight road, of course), but in a much larger scale.

If you compare the Lone Wolf trail with the trails of the Wolf Packs (linked in the answers to the Redditors), it sort of looks like the Lone Wolf was doing everything he could to avoid the packs...

It probably ran that long distance initially to get away from whatever tagged it....

This is a great example of high performance, low resource and minimal dependencies. I wish someone will develop an operating system called Lone Wolf.

Is not lonely, is an explorer, pioneer and cartographer :-).

The three parallel lines next Pitt around oct 22 are really striking. Could those lines be an artifact of GPS, or is the wolf deliberately trying to explore the new area with the minimum effort (perimeter first and then filling the area systematically)?

Update: okay, is using the firebreaks on wild areas and roads to travel. Firebreaks and roads are built in parallel lines

I don’t know what else to say but that is just awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com