Arctic terns undertake the longest migration of any animal, travelling 70,000km annually from Arctic to Antarctic and back, with welfare challenges across this extraordinary journey.
Individual arctic terns face extraordinary energetic demands of bi-annual trans-equatorial migration. Disturbance at breeding colonies causes nest abandonment and chick mortality. Climate change is altering prey availability at critical migration stopovers, creating food shortfalls during what are already energetically extreme journeys. Each individual that fails to complete migration represents both welfare harm and loss to the breeding population.