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Examination of head versus body heading may help clarify the extent to which animal movement pathways are structured by environmental cues?
Gunner, Richard M.; Wilson, Rory P.; Holton, Mark D.; Bennett, Nigel C.; Alagaili, Abdulaziz N.; Bertelsen, Mads F.; Mohammed, Osama B.; Wang, Tobias; Manger, Paul R.; Ismael, Khairi; Scantlebury, D. Michael
Understanding the processes that determine how animals allocate time to space is a major challenge, although
it is acknowledged that summed animal movement pathways over time must define space-time use. The critical
question is then, what processes structure these pathways? Following the idea that turns within pathways might
be based on environmentally determined decisions, we equipped Arabian oryx with head- and body-mounted tags
to 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. After
simulating predators to verify that oryx look directly at objects of interest, we recorded that, during routine
movement, > 60% of all turns in the animals’ paths, before being executed, were preceded by a change in head
heading that was not immediately mirrored by the body heading: The path turn angle (as indicated by the body
heading) correlated with a prior change in head heading (with head heading being mirrored by subsequent turns
in the path) twenty-one times more than when path turns occurred due to the animals adopting a body heading
that went in the opposite direction to the change in head heading. Although we could not determine what the
objects of interest were, and therefore the proposed reasons for turning, we suggest that this reflects the use of
cephalic 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 propose
that examination of points of inflection in highly resolved animal paths could represent decisions in landscapes
and their examination could enhance our understanding of how animal pathways are structured.
Description:
DATA AVAILABILITY : The IMU Oryx datasets have been submitted to Dryad repository (https://doi.
org/10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rc1). The Dryad repository also contains an example
R script that follows the steps outlined in Fig. 1, to detect ‘significant’ changes
in body and head headings.