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...