Examination of head versus body heading may help clarify the extent to which animal movement pathways are structured by environmental cues?

Understanding the processes that determine how animals allocate time to space is a major challenge, althoughit is acknowledged that summed animal movement pathways over time must define space-time use. The criticalquestion is then, what processes structure these pathways? Following the idea that turns within pathways mightbe based on environmentally determined decisions, we equipped Arabian oryx with head- and body-mounted tagsto determine how they orientated their heads – which we posit is indicative of them assessing the environment– in relation to their movement paths, to investigate the role of environment scanning in path tortuosity. Aftersimulating predators to verify that oryx look directly at objects of interest, we recorded that, during routinemovement, > 60% of all turns in the animals’ paths, before being executed, were preceded by a change in headheading that was not immediately mirrored by the body heading: The path turn angle (as indicated by the bodyheading) correlated..., Six Arabian oryx, from a herd of 12 semi-captive animals kept within a 0.5 X 0.5 km natural enclosure within the Imam Saud bin Abdulaziz Royal Nature Reserve (previously called Mahazat as-Sayd), a protected area located in west-central Saudi Arabia (41.58, 22.34), were equipped with head- and body-mounted tags (Daily Diary – standard model; http://www.wildbytetechnologies.com/tags.html) that recorded tri-axial acceleration at 40 Hz and tri-axial magnetic field intensity at 13 Hz using a real-time clock base. The head-mounted tags were glued between the horns while the body-mounted units were attached to a collar and weighted to hang ventrally. The collar also had a dorsally mounted GPS, set to determine location once every 15 mins. Although the real time clocks in the devices were reported to have maximum drift of no more than a few seconds per month, all units were calibrated to synchronize time properly. Tag heading were derived from both head- and collar-mounted tags, using the tilt-..., All data analysis was performed in R., This README file was generated on 2023-11-01 by Richard Gunner.

GENERAL INFORMATION

1. Title of Dataset: Examination of head versus body headingmay help clarify the extent to whichanimal movement pathways are structuredby environmental cues?
2. Corresponding Author Information
Name: Richard Gunner
Institution: Max Planck Institute ofAnimal Behavior
Address: Konstanz, Germany
Email: richard\.m\.g@hotmail\.com \| rgunner@ab\.mpg\.de
3. Date of data collection: Feb 2015
4. Geographic location of data collection: mam Saud bin Abdulaziz Royal Nature Reserve (previ-ously called Mahazat as-Sayd), a protected area located inwest-central Saudi Arabia (41.58, 22.34)
5. Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data: his study was funded by researchers supporting project number RSPD2023R602 from King Saud University, the Deanship of Scientific Researchat the King Saud University through Vice Deanship of Research Chairs, theNational Geographic Global ...