Abstract
Although small-scale navigation is well studied in a wide range of species, much of what is known about landmark use by vertebrates is based on laboratory experiments. To investigate how vertebrates in the wild use landmarks, we trained wild male rufous hummingbirds to feed from a flower that was placed in a constant spatial relationship with two artificial landmarks. In the first experiment, the landmarks and flower were 0.25, 0.5 or 1 m apart and we always moved them 3–4 m after each visit by the bird. In the second experiment, the landmarks and flower were always 0.25 m apart and we moved them either 1 or 0.25 m between trials. In tests, in which we removed the flower, the hummingbirds stopped closer to the predicted flower location when the landmarks had been closer to the flower during training. However, while the distance that the birds stopped from the landmarks and predicted flower location was unaffected by the distance that the landmarks moved between trials, the birds directed their search nearer to the predicted direction of the flower, relative to the landmarks, when the landmarks and flower were more stable in the environment. In the field, then, landmarks alone were sufficient for the birds to determine the distance of a reward but not its direction.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Ken Cheng and two anonymous reviews for their comments, which greatly improved this manuscript. We also thank Maria Tello Ramos, Rachael Marshall, Caitlin Hamilton and Jamie Dunlop for their assistance over the field season. This work was supported by the University of St Andrews, the University of Lethbridge and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada.
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Pritchard, D.J., Hurly, T.A. & Healy, S.D. Effects of landmark distance and stability on accuracy of reward relocation. Anim Cogn 18, 1285–1297 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0896-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0896-7