ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Memory, not just perception, plays an important role in terrestrial mammalian migration.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Heritability of Migration Behaviors in a Wide-Ranging Ungulate.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Dynamic Lake Ice Conditions Shape Caribou Water-Crossing Behavior in the Arctic.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Novel genomics insights into the molecular evolution of long-distance migratory mammals.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- Species Distribution Modeling of Killer Whales (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Wolverines use spatial memory to plan efficient routes through rugged terrain.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- It's time to go-Drivers and plasticity of migration phenology in a short-distance migratory ungulate.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- On the interface between cultural transmission, phenotypic diversity, demography and the conservation of migratory ungulates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Migratory behaviour of humpback whales in the southeastern Pacific under climate change.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Identifying signals of memory from observations of animal movements.Movement ecology · 2024Review
- The calculated voyage: benchmarking optimal strategies and consumptions in the Japanese eel's spawning migration.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evidence of object permanence, short-term spatial memory, causality, understanding of object properties and gravity across five different ungulate species.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Decoupling of bird migration from the changing phenology of spring green-up.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- A Review of Cervidae Visual Ecology.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Prospecting during egg laying informs incubation recess movements of eastern wild turkeys.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Stable seasonal migration patterns in giant pandas.Zoological research · 2023Article
- Reinforced diffusions as models of memory-mediated animal movement.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Decadal migration phenology of a long-lived Arctic icon keeps pace with climate change.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Responses to natural gas development differ by season for two migratory ungulates.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Article
- Wild cognition - linking form and function of cognitive abilities within a natural context.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
One of the key questions regarding the underlying mechanisms of mammalian land migrations is how animals select where to go. Most studies assume perception of resources as the navigational mechanism. The possible role of memory that would allow forecasting conditions at distant locations and times based on information about environmental conditions from previous years has been little studied. We study migrating zebra in Botswana using an individual-based simulation model, where perceptually guided individuals use currently sensed resources at different perceptual ranges, while memory-guided individuals use long-term averages of past resources to forecast future conditions. We compare simulated individuals guided by perception or memory on resource landscapes of remotely sensed vegetation data to trajectories of GPS-tagged zebras. Our results show that memory provides a clear signal that best directs migrants to their destination compared to perception at even the largest perceptual ranges. Zebras modelled with memory arrived two to four times, or up to 100 km, closer to the migration destination than those using perception. We suggest that memory in addition to perception is important for directing ungulate migration. Furthermore, our findings are important for the conservation of migratory mammals, as memory informing direction suggests migration routes could be relatively inflexible.
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