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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