ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fevo.2025.1571302
This article is part of the Research TopicEcology, Evolution, and Diversity of Papionini PrimatesView all 4 articles
Baboon Route Repetition in a Seasonal Environment
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Biology, Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- 2Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- 3Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behaviour, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Algarve, Faro, Faro, Portugal
- 4Department of Science, Gorongosa National Park, Sofala Province, Mozambique
- 5Centro de Investigacao em Biodiversidade e Recursos Geneticos (CIBIO-InBIO), Vairão, Porto, Portugal
- 6Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States
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Route-based navigation is a common movement strategy for a variety of taxa, wherein animals repeatedly re-use familiar paths during travel. However, this type of navigation remains understudied in wild animals that experience regular displacement, raising questions about the robustness and longevity of such routes and route memories. The seasonal flooding of Gorongosa National Park (GNP), Mozambique, provides an opportunity to test multiple facets of route-based navigation in wild primates, due to its high seasonality and annual flooding. First, we establish that baboons living in two different troops affected by the flooding remain in or return to the same areas that they were ranging in before the floods.Then, we compare daily paths using nearest-neighbour analysis to show that the baboons have habitually used routes, and finally test whether those routes are maintained throughout the year, with a focus on areas that were vacated for more than two months. We find that the baboons vacate areas at the peripheries of their home ranges during the flooding period, but routes in these areas are either non-existent or are only reused within a season. This indicates that routes may not be maintained in long-term memory spanning several months, or that route reuse is in part dependent on seasonal resources or navigational aids.
Keywords: Route Reuse, GIS analysis, Chacma baboon, Movement, Memory
Received: 05 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lewis-Bevan, Hammond, Carvalho and Biro. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lynn Lewis-Bevan, Department of Biology, Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
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