Arctic Foxes 'Grow' Their Own Gardens
The little carnivores' colorful dens provide veritable oases in the tundra, a new study says.
Barrow, AlaskaThe underground homes, often a century old, are topped with gardens exploding with lush dune grass, diamondleaf willows, and yellow wildflowers—a flash of color in an otherwise gray landscape.
“They’re bright green and everything around them is just brown,” says Brian Person, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska. “It pops.”
He’s talking about arctic fox dens.
Person has spent the better part of a decade studying the wide-ranging carnivores' movements throughout northern Alaska. The 6-to-12-pound (3-to-5-kilogram) foxes, which prey mostly on lemmings and small game, are found throughout the circumpolar Arctic, from Alaska and Canada all the way into Europe and Greenland.
He's tracked satellite-collared foxes that have traveled as far east as the Chukchi Sea (map) before doubling back and hopping sea ice until they’ve skirted the
