taking a shortcut: what mechanisms do fish use?

Path integration is a powerful navigational mechanism whereby individuals continuously update their distance and angular vector of movement to calculate their position in relation to their departure location, allowing them to return along the most direct route even across unfamiliar terrain. While path integration has been investigated in several terrestrial animals, it has never been demonstrated in aquatic vertebrates, where movement occurs through volumetric space and sensory cues available for navigation are likely to differ substantially from those in terrestrial environments. By performing displacement experiments with Lamprologus ocellatus, we show evidence consistent with fish using path integration to navigate alongside other mechanisms (allothetic place cues and route recapitulation). These results indicate that the use of path integration is likely to be deeply rooted within the vertebrate phylogeny irrespective of the environment, and suggests that fish may possess a spatial..., Ethics and Approval
The study was approved by the University of Oxford’s Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body (AWERB) (project code: APA/1/5/ZOO/NASPA/Burt/DistanceEstimation).
Animal husbandry
We used 40 naive adult male cichlids (Lamprologus ocellatus, Figure 4), sourced from a captive-bred laboratory population (standard body length = 3-5cm). Individuals came originally from 6 subpopulations: B (n=4), C (n=7), D (n=1), E (n=4), F (n=16), G (n=8, Table S3). Subjects were housed individually in tanks measuring 35 cm x 32 cm x 60 cm (width x height x length) containing a sand substrate to a depth of 4 cm and a single home shell. Illumination via fluorescent light followed a 12h light/dark cycle. Individuals were fed twice a day, in the morning and the afternoon, with commercial flake food, supplemented with Mysis shrimps once a week. The tanks were cleaned once a week and the water quality checked to maintain constant pH, gH and KH of 8.4, 23 and 12ppm respectively. Ammonia and nitrit..., , # Taking a shortcut: What mechanisms do fish use?

Please find below all descriptions of data files and code used for the manuscript: Taking a shortcut: what mechanisms do fish use? , by Sibeaux et al. 2024

To better understand the data analyses and processing we have organised this file into 5 subsections:
1-Matlab trajectory analysis
2-Distance Analysis with R
3-Distance to Random
4-Comparison fish versus model angle and distance
5-intrinsic and extrinsic effects on model chosen
6--Extra analyses asked by reviewers

Some files are reused among subsections

---

## 1-Matlab trajectory analysis

Please find below the description of the MATLAB code used for the analysis of the fish trajectories and the associated data files.

1\_ \"PathIntegrationVideoTracker.m\"
MATLAB file produced by C.N. to track the fish in the experimental apparatus and extract the x and y coordinates of the fish

2\_ \"PathAnalysisCropingtoSize.m\"
MATLAB file (by A.S.) allows to crop the fish trajectory and the mode...