Greatest total cumulative annual distance covered by a terrestrial animal

The greatest total cumulative annual distance (TCAD) covered by a terrestrial animal species - i.e., the sum of all movements by a specimen or population of it in any direction and of any distance over the period of a year - is that of the grey wolf (Canis lupus). One adult male specimen from south-west Mongolia yielded a record TCAD of 7,247 kilometres (4,503 miles); an adult female specimen from central Alaska, USA, yielded a TCAD of 5,630 kilometres (3,498 miles) after hunting caribou in that region. Other examples from this species that exceeded 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) are also known. A major rival for this animal record is the onager or Asian wild ass (Equus hemionus), one of whose subspecies - the khulan or Mongolian wild ass (E. h. hemionus) - logged a distance of 6,145 km (3,818 miles) over a year in south-east Mongolia.

Another species that yields very high TCADs is the caribou (Rangifer tarandus) - also known as reindeer in the Old World. Using satellite telemetry, a herd in Alaska, USA, known as the "Porcupine Herd" notched up a record of 5,055 km (3,141 mi) for this species. While TCAD takes into account all cumulative movement by an animal, caribou take the record for longest round-trip migration by a terrestrial animal in terms of straight-line distance between the end points: 1,350 km (839 mi). In the past, this has been widely reported as significantly higher but it's now suspected that the measurement was in fact based on TCAD rather than length of the migratory route.

Moreover, the Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) has a known maximum TCAD of 5,903 km (3,668 mi) as recorded in northern Canada.

All of these figures were collated and published in the journal Scientific Reports on 25 October 2019 in a paper led by Kyle Joly of the Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network of the National Park Service.