Abstract
Movement and searching behaviors at diverse spatial scales are important for understanding how animals interact with their environment. Although the shapes of branches and the voids in arboreal habitats seem likely to affect searching behaviors, their influence is poorly understood. To gain insights into how both environmental structure and the attributes of an animal may affect movement and searching, we compared the three-dimensional exploratory movements of snakes in the dark on two simulated arboreal surfaces (disc and horizontal cylinder). Most of the exploratory movements of snakes in the dark were a small fraction of the distances they could reach while bridging gaps in the light. The snakes extended farther away from the edge of the supporting surface at the ends of the cylinder than from the sides of the cylinder or from any direction from the surface of the disc. The exploratory movements were not random, and the surface shape and three-dimensional directions had significant interactive effects on how the movements were structured in time. Thus, the physical capacity for reaching did not limit the area that was explored, but the shape of the supporting surface and the orientation relative to gravity did create biased searching patterns.
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Acknowledgments
We thank G. Byrnes for assistance with the data analysis. The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (IOS 0813497 to B.C.J.). Care and treatment of the snakes were approved by the Institutional Animal Care Use Committee (protocol number 07-01-08-01) of the University of Cincinnati, and the principles of laboratory animal care (NIH publication No. 85-23, revised 1985) were followed.
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Jayne, B.C., Olberding, J.P., Athreya, D. et al. Surface shape affects the three-dimensional exploratory movements of nocturnal arboreal snakes. J Comp Physiol A 198, 905–913 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-012-0761-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-012-0761-y