Abstract
A number of diurnal species have been shown to use directional information from the sun to orientate. The use of the sun in this way has been suggested to occur in either a time-dependent (relying on specific positional information) or a time-compensated manner (a compass that adjusts itself over time with the shifts in the sun’s position). However, some interplay may occur between the two where a species could also use the sun in a time-limited way, whereby animals acquire certain information about the change of position, but do not show full compensational abilities. We tested whether Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) use the sun as an orientation marker to provide information for caching and recovery. This species is a social sciurid that inhabits arid, sparsely vegetated habitats in Southern Africa, where the sun is nearly always visible during the diurnal period. Due to the lack of obvious landmarks, we predicted that they might use positional cues from the sun in the sky as a reference point when caching and recovering food items. We provide evidence that Cape ground squirrels use information from the sun’s position while caching and reuse this information in a time-limited way when recovering these caches.
Highlights
As the sun can provide directional information, this cue can be useful for caching animals when depositing and relocating food items
We predicted that Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), a social rodent species, use the sun as a frame of reference when navigating in the context of caching and recovering food items
We found that the component distributions extracted from a finite mixture model (Fig. 2a) were significantly different (KS-test, D = 0.21, P = 0.001), with the track azimuthal angles of the distribution to the left of the sun being larger than the azimuthal angles to the right (LRT, v12 = 10.46, P = 0.001, Fig. 2b)
Summary
As the sun can provide directional information, this cue can be useful for caching animals when depositing and relocating food items. Clark’s nutcrackers[17] and rats[18] (Rattus norvegicus) show some flexibility in finding a reward when landmark arrays are rotated whilst keeping the configuration constant This suggests that animals may be treating landmark arrays as units of information, identifying the position of a reward within the array. Animals may show some flexibility in the use of this information if they are able to account for the movement of the sun in relation to landmark features. This can arise through simple associative learning processes, whereby individuals learn the relationship of the sun and the “visual scene”, within familiar areas[3]. We examined recovery behaviours to determine the role the celestial system might play when subjects re-orientated back to food they had previously cached
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