Ice skating competition is also foraging, where the ice skater observes the other’s apis

When permission to start is given, the icemen rush onto the ice with their augers. It’s busy now. Where is the fishy place?

The search includes coves, edges of islands or deep depressions. On that side, the fish-hungry fishes where the others are digging.

Why does the neighbor get more fish from that opening?

It’s about catching fish and winning the race. But there are other sides to the race. How do people search for food in nature, individually and together, researchers ask.

Ice cream contest can partly answer it.

The researchers organized ten ice skating competitions on the lakes of North Karelia in February–March 2022 and March–April 2023.

There were 74 volunteer ice skaters. They got their own GPS tracker. A camera was attached to the ice skater’s headdress, which followed the movements and the ice skating itself.

A study was completed on the movements and choices of ice skaters, which was published by a scientific journal Science.

For a Finn to the angler, such a study did not seem strange at all. On the contrary, the anglers found it very interesting.

The researchers’ view is that the decision-making related to the search for human food has been studied too much in laboratories.

And foraging humans have previously been studied as individual actors. In ice skating, people move individually and in groups in a limited area and look for food.

How did you track down the catch in ice skating together and alone, when the competitor was trying to make it?

The angler was on average 126 seconds with such an opening where no fish could be caught.

Ice cream followed by a behavioral scientist Alexander Schakowski with his team. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.

The group included a professor of aquatic ecology Raine Kortet from the University of Eastern Finland.

The studied 74 volunteer ice skaters covered 477 routes on the ice in the games. The studied games lasted about three hours.

23.1 percent of the participants were women. The subjects walked an average of 1,247 meters during the race. The ice skaters made a total of more than 16,000 decisions about where they headed next on the ice.

The environment from which food is sought has often been ignored. Now the researchers collected thousands of data points from ice skating competitions. They got an accurate picture of how the fishermen moved on the ice. Additional sources were the depth maps of the lakes.

“The implementation was successful because the approach was multidisciplinary and the volunteer participants were motivated,” says Kortet.

Researchers know surprisingly little about how people make decisions in the wild when they forage.

Ice skaters relied a lot on social cues in the race, especially when they failed in their opening. Clear individual differences in the use of hints were revealed.

Ice skaters generally stayed longer in areas where other competitors were very close. Concentrations developed in certain areas, where fishermen are most looking for a good place to ice.

The angler was on average 126 seconds with such an opening where no fish could be caught. If he caught at least one fish, he stayed at the opening much longer, averaging 582 seconds.

Catches from one race ranged from 279 grams to 2,012 grams on average.

Human foraging is demanding compared to many other animal species, say the researchers.

The pressure in foraging has partly guided human development. In the ice race, the pressure was created by the fact that you had to catch more fish than others in a certain time.