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Research Article
There and back again – a zebra's tale
Hattie Bartlam-Brooks, Simon Wilshin, Tatjana Hubel, Stephen Hailes, Emily Bennitt, Alan M. Wilson
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb232140 doi: 10.1242/jeb.232140 Published 2 December 2020
Hattie Bartlam-Brooks
1Structure and Motion Laboratory, Royal Veterinary College, University of London, London AL9 7TA, UK
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  • ORCID record for Hattie Bartlam-Brooks
  • For correspondence: hbartlambrooks@rvc.ac.uk
Simon Wilshin
1Structure and Motion Laboratory, Royal Veterinary College, University of London, London AL9 7TA, UK
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Tatjana Hubel
1Structure and Motion Laboratory, Royal Veterinary College, University of London, London AL9 7TA, UK
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Stephen Hailes
2Department of Computer Science, University College London, 66-72 Gower St, London WC1E 6EA, UK
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Emily Bennitt
3Okavango Research Institute, University of Botswana, Maun, Botswana
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Alan M. Wilson
1Structure and Motion Laboratory, Royal Veterinary College, University of London, London AL9 7TA, UK
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ABSTRACT

Animals need to navigate between resources such as water, food and shelter, and how they achieve this is likely to vary with species. Here, using high-accuracy GPS data, we studied repeated journeys made by wild plains zebra (Equus quagga) through a naturally vegetated environment to explore whether they consistently follow the same route through the area or whether they use a range of routes to reach their goal. We used a model to distinguish and quantify these two possibilities and show that our observations are consistent with the use of multiple routes. Our model performs better than assuming a uniform angular distribution of trajectories. The typical separation of the routes was found to be small (1.96 m), while the scale at which neighbouring trajectories are informative to direction of travel was found to be large (with a confidence interval of 1.19–26.4 m). Our observations are consistent with the hypothesis that zebra are able to navigate without having to return to previously used routes, instead using numerous different routes of similar trajectories.

Footnotes

  • Competing interests

    The authors declare no competing or financial interests.

  • Author contributions

    Conceptualization: H.B.-B., S.D.W., T.Y.H., A.M.W.; Methodology: H.B.-B., S.D.W., T.Y.H., A.M.W.; Software: S.D.W.; Formal analysis: H.B.-B., S.D.W., T.Y.H., S.H.; Investigation: H.B.-B., S.D.W., T.Y.H., E.B., A.M.W.; Resources: A.M.W.; Data curation: H.B.-B., S.D.W., E.B.; Writing - original draft: H.B.-B., S.D.W.; Writing - review & editing: H.B.-B., S.D.W., T.Y.H., S.H., E.B., A.M.W.; Supervision: S.H., A.M.W.; Project administration: A.M.W.; Funding acquisition: A.M.W.

  • Funding

    We extend our thanks to the EPSRC (EP/H013016/1), BBSRC (BB/J018007/1) and ERC (323041) for funding.

  • Data availability

    Code for model, fitting procedures and statistics is available from GitHub: https://github.com/swilshin/trajbasis.

  • Supplementary information

    Supplementary information available online at https://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.232140.supplemental

  • Received July 10, 2020.
  • Accepted October 19, 2020.
  • © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
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Keywords

  • Equus quagga
  • Navigation
  • Tracking
  • GPS
  • Modelling
  • Radial basis network

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Research Article
There and back again – a zebra's tale
Hattie Bartlam-Brooks, Simon Wilshin, Tatjana Hubel, Stephen Hailes, Emily Bennitt, Alan M. Wilson
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb232140 doi: 10.1242/jeb.232140 Published 2 December 2020
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Research Article
There and back again – a zebra's tale
Hattie Bartlam-Brooks, Simon Wilshin, Tatjana Hubel, Stephen Hailes, Emily Bennitt, Alan M. Wilson
Journal of Experimental Biology 2020 223: jeb232140 doi: 10.1242/jeb.232140 Published 2 December 2020

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