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
Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, 78467, Konstanz, Germany.
Department of Biosciences, College of Science, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 8PP, Wales.
Mov Ecol. 2023 Oct 27;11(1):71. doi: 10.1186/s40462-023-00432-y.
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.
理解决定动物如何在空间中分配时间的过程是一项重大挑战，尽管人们承认随着时间推移动物的运动路径总和必然界定了时空利用情况。关键问题在于，是什么过程塑造了这些路径？基于路径中的转向可能基于环境决定的想法，我们给阿拉伯羚羊佩戴了头部和身体安装的标签，以确定它们如何相对于运动路径来定向头部——我们假定这表明它们在评估环境——从而研究环境扫描在路径曲折度中的作用。在模拟捕食者以验证羚羊会直接看向感兴趣的物体后，我们记录到，在日常运动中，动物路径中所有转向的60%以上在执行之前，头部方向会发生变化，而身体方向不会立即随之改变：路径转向角度（由身体方向指示）与头部方向的先前变化相关（路径随后的转向反映头部方向），其关联程度比动物采用与头部方向变化相反的身体方向导致路径转向时高出21倍。尽管我们无法确定感兴趣的物体是什么，因此也无法确定转向的原因，但我们认为这反映了利用头部感官来检测有利的环境特征（如食物）或有害特征（如捕食者）。我们初步研究的结果表明了动物路径中转向可能如何出现，并且我们提出，检查高分辨率动物路径中的拐点可能代表在景观中的决策，对其进行研究可以增进我们对动物路径如何形成的理解。
