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