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Detecting oriented movement of animals
It is easy to test whether an animal orients towards a distant goal, if you know what the goal is. E.g. homing pigeons are supposed to be flying to their home loft, and thus you can easily test how well they do so. But if an animal simply travels in a straight path, how do you know if that animal is travelling towards a distant goal? I discovered how to test for this; it is based on a known method of testing for random travel. Animals use many types of mechanisms for determing where they go - e.g. weasels tend to alternate turns and foxes walk towards interesting odours. I show that if you zoom out when viewing animal paths then all of the different movement mechanisms sort themselves out to only two types - orientation versus random movement. Then one simply tests for the presence of the random movement.DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.005
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DOI (Digital Object Identifier, will open in another window):: doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2006.04.005