Besides stunning landscapes, Iceland also has a surprisingly diverse fauna to offer. From whales to arctic foxes, from reindeer to horses, there are quite a few life forms on this little patch of earth. And it wouldn’t be Iceland if some of them didn’t come with a story worth telling.
Curtain up for Iceland’s wildlife!
1. The arctic fox is the only indigenous land animal in Iceland
Until the settlers arrived and brought various animals with them, there were no land animals in Iceland at all. Except for the little arctic fox, which made its way to Iceland from the Arctic.
Horses, reindeer, sheep… They all came over with the settlers. Until then, however, the arctic fox had the place all to itself.
2. If you eat a puffin, its life partner will be sad and lonely for the rest of its days
Some restaurants offer them, and some heartless people actually order them: puffins.
Anyone who has ever seen one in the wild would surely never do such a terrible thing — but if you do, it’s not thaaat tragic: the populations of these little aviators are relatively healthy and they aren’t hunted in large numbers. So your guilty conscience can stay within reasonable limits.
(A note from our readers: The puffins could actually be doing a lot better, because we humans unfortunately do have a negative impact on them after all…)
I’ll still milk it a little longer, because you surely didn’t know that these little rascals usually mate for life. There are no puffin weddings, the puffin bride doesn’t get kidnapped, and the puffin grooms don’t fly off to the strip club with their buddies (by the way, only because there aren’t any left in Iceland, as Lundin told me…). But still, a puffin girl and a puffin boy meet up again every year to… um… well, you know. Wink wink!
So if you eat a puffin, you might be eating the boyfriend of a soon-to-be lonely puffin lady. Think about that before you order!
3. Icelandic horses that leave the country are never allowed to return
Icelandic horses are one of the purest horse breeds on this planet. Icelanders are very proud of their cuddly companions, and there is probably no worse insult than calling them ‘ponies’. So please be careful with that.
The Icelandics (the horses) even have two gaits entirely of their own, which are very special to this breed. The animals are rather small and sturdily built, have thick, cuddly coats and are quite playful. They have a sweet nature, but also a good deal of stubbornness.
Because it’s very important to the Icelanders (the people) that things stay this way, there is a law that completely bans the import of horses into Iceland. So you will never see a non-Icelandic horse on Icelandic soil. And by the way, those fellows with antlers in the east are no exception — those are reindeer!
And now for the heartbreaking part of the story: if an Icelandic horse decides to go on holiday, say a cruise to the Caribbean or something, it is never allowed to come back home afterwards! That, by the way, is one of the main reasons why so few Caribbean cruises are booked by Icelanders (the horses)…
4. The oldest living animal came from Iceland: Ming the clam
I learned this fun fact during my dive at Strytan, in the north of Iceland. Erlendur has found some amazing things here near Akureyri himself. For example, the only diveable hydrothermal vents, in the fjords north of the town. At a depth of just over 30 metres you’ll find rock formations that have developed over thousands of years, and at their tips boiling hot water streams out into the ice-cold ocean.
When he dives down there, Erlendur often brings a bag of clams with him. Treats for Stefania, the lady wolffish who regularly visits Erlendur and then follows him and his dive guests around the rock formations every step of the way.
These clams aren’t just tasty, though — they’re often also very old. Very, very old! Just like with a tree, you can read exactly how old a particular animal is from the rings on its shell. One day, researchers were more than a little surprised when they counted the rings of one clam: one, two, three… one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and three… two hundred and one, two hundred and two… long story short: this clam was over 500 years old.
The tortoises on the Galapagos Islands were beside themselves and demanded further investigation, but even analyses using scientific methods beyond so-called ‘counting’ confirmed an age well past five hundred. Ever since, they’ve been trying really hard on the Galapagos Islands to get older faster. Until then, however, the earth’s oldest animal remains Ming the clam, from Akureyri!
5. There are no ants in Iceland… or are there?
In many, many places on the internet you can read that there are no ants in Iceland.
I once investigated this empirically and kept an eye out on my way to work: and indeed, not a single ant in Iceland! Well, at least not on the way between Reykjavik and Thingvellir.
An Icelandic woman, however, writes in this article about her battle against the red ant.
I’m confused and having sleepless nights because one question keeps haunting me: are there ants in Iceland or not!?
Please leave a comment if you know, send me photo evidence, or let us know in any other way what you know! 🙂
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