A spaghetti map for Brutus’ movement

Brutus’ locations (small circles) since capture on 08 July 2009 to 30 November 2009. Each location is joined to the next consecutive location 12 hours apart with a line, resulting in what we call a “spaghetti” map. This joining of the dots can help us identify separate trips to a given area when there are several locations from other times. The lines joining consecutive locations are straight lines and the true path taken is likely anything but. However, it does provide us with the general direction and distance traveled. The most obvious trip we see is the one taken to Axel Heiberg Island to the west as Dave has pointed out earlier. That 129 kilometers (80 mile) trip began in the evening of 18 November and ended in the evening of 21 November, for an elapsed time of 84 hours. With the locations coming at 12-hour intervals we can’t precisely say what Brutus was doing, but no doubt he was hunting and likely resting at times too. We can also add up the distances traveled between locations and estimate a minimum distance traveled. Since monitoring began, we have received 289 of a possible 290 locations. The cumulative distance from point-to-point that Brutus has traveled up to 30 November is 2,726 km (1,683 miles). The average distance between these consecutive 12-hr locations is 9.5 km (5.8 miles) and has ranged from 0 (resting) to 41 km (25.3 miles). That 41 km distance occurred on Brutus’ trip to Axel Heiberg Island on 18 November. So far, the north-south extent of the Brutus’ locations is 93 km (57.4 miles) and the east west extent is 109 km (67.3 miles). Note that the fiords would all be frozen now and can be crossed on foot.

--Dean.