Ungulates rely less on visual cues, but more on adapting movement behaviour, when searching for forage

Jan A Venter; Herbert H. T. Prins; Alla Mashanova; Rob Slotow

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2860v1

Ungulates rely less on visual cues, but more on adapting movement behaviour, when searching for forage

Jan A Venter ¹, Herbert H. T. Prins^2,3, Alla Mashanova⁴, Rob Slotow³

1 School of Natural Resource Management, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, George, Western Cape Province, South Africa

2 Resource Ecology Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

3 School of Life Sciences, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

4 Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2860v1

Published: 2017-03-09
Accepted: 2017-03-09

Subject Areas: Animal Behavior, Ecology
Keywords: ungulate, foraging, Pondoland, Mkambati Nature Reserve, eland, zebra, hartebeest, movement behavior

Copyright: © 2017 Venter et al.
Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Venter JA, Prins HHT, Mashanova A, Slotow R. 2017. Ungulates rely less on visual cues, but more on adapting movement behaviour, when searching for forage. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2860v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2860v1

Abstract

Finding suitable forage patches in a heterogeneous landscape, where patches change dynamically both spatially and temporally could be challenging to large herbivores, especially if they have no a priori knowledge of the location of the patches. We tested whether three large grazing herbivores with a variety of different traits, improve their efficiency when foraging at a heterogeneous habitat patch scale, by using visual cues to gain a priori knowledge about potential higher value foraging patches. For each species (zebra (Equus burchelli ), red hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus subspecies camaa ) and eland ( Tragelaphus oryx )), we used step lengths and directionality of movement to infer whether they were using visual cues to find suitable forage patches at a habitat patch scale. Step lengths were significantly longer for all species when moving to non-visible patches than to visible patches, but all movements showed little directionality. Of the three species, zebra movements were the most directional. Red hartebeest had the shortest step lengths and zebra the longest. We conclude that these large grazing herbivores may not exclusively use visual cues when foraging at a habitat patch scale, but would rather adapt their movement behaviour, mainly step length, to the heterogeneity of the specific landscape.