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Dryad

Examination of head versus body heading may help clarify the extent to which animal movement pathways are structured by environmental cues?

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Nov 02, 2023 version files 216.39 MB

Abstract

Understanding the processes that determine how animals allocate time to space is a major challenge, althoughit is acknowledged that summed animal movement pathways over time must define space-time use. The criticalquestion is then, what processes structure these pathways? Following the idea that turns within pathways mightbe based on environmentally determined decisions, we equipped Arabian oryx with head- and body-mounted tagsto determine how they orientated their heads – which we posit is indicative of them assessing the environment– in relation to their movement paths, to investigate the role of environment scanning in path tortuosity. Aftersimulating predators to verify that oryx look directly at objects of interest, we recorded that, during routinemovement, > 60% of all turns in the animals’ paths, before being executed, were preceded by a change in headheading that was not immediately mirrored by the body heading: The path turn angle (as indicated by the bodyheading) correlated with a prior change in head heading (with head heading being mirrored by subsequent turnsin the path) twenty-one times more than when path turns occurred due to the animals adopting a body headingthat went in the opposite direction to the change in head heading. Although we could not determine what theobjects of interest were, and therefore the proposed reasons for turning, we suggest that this reflects the use ofcephalic senses to detect advantageous environmental features (e.g. food) or to detect detrimental features (e.g.predators). The results of our pilot study suggest how turns might emerge in animal pathways and we proposethat examination of points of inflection in highly resolved animal paths could represent decisions in landscapesand their examination could enhance our understanding of how animal pathways are structured.