Understanding the amount of space required by animals to fulfill their biological needs is essential for comprehending their behavior, their ecological role within their community, and for effective conservation planning and resource management. The space-use patterns of habituated primates often are studied by using handheld GPS devices, which provide detailed movement information that can link patterns of ranging and space-use to the behavioral decisions that generate these patterns. However, these data may not accurately represent an animal’s total movements, posing challenges when the desired inference is at the home range scale. To address this problem, we used a 13-year dataset from 11 groups of white-faced capuchins (
Evidence of learning walks related to scorpion home burrow navigation
The Navigation by Chemotextural Familiarity Hypothesis (NCFH) suggests that scorpions use their midventral pectines to gather chemical and textural information near their burrows and use this information as they subsequently return home. For NCFH to be viable, animals must somehow acquire home-directed “tastes” of the substrate, such as through path integration (PI) and/or learning walks. We conducted laboratory behavioral trials using desert grassland scorpions (Paruroctonus utahensis). Animals reliably formed burrows in small mounds of sand we provided in the middle of circular, sandlined behavioral arenas. We processed overnight infrared video recordings with a MATLAB script that tracked animal movements at 1-2 s intervals. In all, we analyzed the movements of 23 animals, representing nearly 1500 hours of video recording. We found that once animals established their home burrows, they immediately made one to several short, looping excursions away from and back to their burrows before walking greater distances. We also observed similar excursions when animals made burrows in level sand in the middle of the arena (i.e., no mound provided). These putative learning walks, together with recently reported PI in scorpions, may provide the crucial home-directed information requisite for NCFH.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1911370
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10332560
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advances in experimental biology
- ISSN:
- 1872-2423
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.28.474378
