Winters are long and frigid in North Karelia, a Finnish state on the Russian border. Many locals pass the time sitting on a frozen lake, fishing pole in hand. Once settled into a cozy spot, fishers must decide how long to stay put before braving fierce winds and knee-deep snow to trek to a new spot or even a neighboring lake.
The ice fishers’ decision-making process loosely mirrors that of subsistence strategies in the wild. Across time, people have had to mentally calculate how long to gather resources in a given area, whether collecting berries, digging for tubers or luring fish under a thick layer of ice, before expending the energy and time required to head elsewhere.
Existing research into human foraging assumes that ice fishers would rely primarily on personal knowledge when choosing or leaving a spot. But that research is largely based on solo foragers. And often those “foragers” are online video game players, trying to snag as many resources as possible in the climate-controlled comfort of a lab.
In real life, foragers — or fishers, in this case — typically seek resources alongside others. And rather than forging their own path, a risky move in a hostile environment, they may instead choose to follow the crowd, researchers report January 29 in Science.
Going it alone and the wisdom of the group are “almost equally important,” says Alexander Schakowski, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In fact, fishers down on their luck are more likely to stick with others than rely on their gut, his team’s new study suggests.
Unpacking how humans make foraging decisions in extreme environments — from the tropics to the Arctic — hints at how complex thinking evolved, researchers suspect.
“This gives us some more information on drivers of intelligence,” says Friederike “Freddy” Hillemann, a behavioral ecologist at Durham University in England who was not involved with the study.
In Nordic countries, food finding has long entailed drilling into thick ice to access fish. Ice fishing for subsistence may be less common nowadays, but fishing for sport remains hugely popular, with events in Finland drawing thousands of competitors.
So as a natural experiment, Schakowski and his colleagues hosted ice fishing contests across Northern Karelia. During 10 tournaments in 2022 and 2023, 74 competitors participated, including 31 individuals who took part in all of the contests. Aquatic ecologist Raine Kortet of the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, an avid ice fisher, recruited the region’s top fishers. (Schakowski, on the other hand, admits he’s a fisher out of water. “I tried it once. I wasn’t really successful. I didn’t really know what to do if I caught a fish,” he says.)
Participants had three hours to catch as many kilograms of perch as possible. Top finishers received cash prizes and bragging rights. Competitors wore GPS trackers and head-mounted cameras so the researchers could observe how they made decisions on the ice.
Contestants had 15 minutes to find their first spot, with most abandoning a spot with no bites within a couple minutes. Pretty quickly, individuals started clustering to form groups of five to 10 people, Schakowski says. But these groups didn’t appear like friendly alliances; contestants spoke little and often sat with their backs to each other to hide their catch.
Analysis of the video footage showed that fishers tended to rely on personal successes when deciding whether to stay at or leave a spot. And they were more likely to ditch being the loner and join a crowd when they weren’t having much luck catching fish.
The lake environment itself, such as fishers prioritizing steep areas of the lakebed where fish are thought to seek refuge, played less of a role than expected. Environmental cues might play a stronger role in other places where the terrain is more variable, Schakowski says. A single study of a single community cannot capture the myriad clues and practices that humans have adopted in their perpetual quest for food.
It’s not surprising that ice fishers stick together, says anthropologist Michael Gurven of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We’re social creatures, and almost everything we do involves looking over our shoulders and seeing what others are up to.”
Both Gurven and Hillemann suggest that the team take its work a step further and interview the ice fishers to see how they describe their decision-making process. This work has a clear perk over foraging research in other animals, Hillemann says. “We can talk to people.”
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