Meeting Abstract
All free-ranging animals need to be able to move efficiently between the resources they require; poor navigation wastes energy and time, potentially reducing environmental fitness, and ultimately puts an animal at risk of death from dehydration and starvation. Here we show that zebra navigate between these resources (over a range of around 100 square kilometres) not by following a small number of specific paths, but rather by moving along sets of parallel paths, all without long range landmarks to aid navigation. We do this through the application of a model based on a radial basis function network to GPS tracks of zebra movement in the Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana. The proposed model performs better than assuming uniform angular distribution of trajectories with a significant improvement in an Akaike Information Criterion. The scale at which neighbouring trajectories are informative was found to be large compared with the typical track separation. These results are inconsistent with the zebra following only a single memorized track between destinations but rather imply the use of any of the available tracks which allow progress to a destination. This suggests zebra have the ability to navigate without the requirement to return to the original track if perturbed.
