# What is the most impressive feat of endurance in the animal kingdom?

> Months without food, oceans crossed without landing, hearts that stop for the winter. Pick the one that sounds least survivable.

*By YPB Team · Published September 19, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-most-impressive-feat-of-endurance-in-the-animal-kingdom*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Camel** — score 1000/1000
   Crosses deserts for a week or more without water, then rehydrates over a hundred litres in minutes.
2. **Bowhead Whale** — score 1000/1000
   Lives past two hundred years in Arctic water, the longest-lived mammal known.
3. **Arctic Tern** — score 862/1000
   Flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back every year, the longest annual migration on earth.
4. **Emperor Penguin** — score 862/1000
   Males stand through the Antarctic winter balancing an egg on their feet, fasting for over two months.
5. **Wood Frog** — score 764/1000
   Freezes solid each winter, heart stopped, and thaws back to life in spring.
6. **Bar-tailed Godwit** — score 647/1000
   Holds the record for the longest non-stop bird flight, Alaska to New Zealand without landing once.
7. **Brown Bear** — score 647/1000
   Spends up to half the year in a den without eating, drinking or urinating, and loses about a third of its body weight doing it.
8. **Naked Mole-Rat** — score 647/1000
   Survives eighteen minutes without oxygen by switching its metabolism to run on fructose.
9. **Monarch Butterfly** — score 503/1000
   Migrates thousands of miles to Mexican fir forests over several generations, none of which has made the trip before.
10. **Sperm Whale** — score 503/1000
   Dives past 2,000 metres and holds its breath for over an hour hunting squid in the dark.
11. **Pronghorn** — score 503/1000
   Sustains sixty kilometres an hour for miles, built for a predator that went extinct ten thousand years ago.
12. **Tardigrade** — score 0/1000
   Survives boiling, freezing, desiccation and the vacuum of space by shutting its metabolism almost entirely off.
13. **Sockeye Salmon** — score 0/1000
   Swims hundreds of miles upstream without feeding to spawn in the gravel it hatched in, then dies.
14. **Albatross** — score 0/1000
   Stays at sea for years at a stretch, sleeping on the wing and circling the Southern Ocean.
15. **Alpine Marmot** — score 0/1000
   Hibernates eight months of the year at altitude, waking every couple of weeks just to shiver warm again.

Tags: nature, science, animals, records