Author(s): Roger A. Powell and Michael S. Mitchell Source: Journal of Mammalogy, 93(4):948-958. 2012. Published By: American Society of Mammalogists DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1644/11-MAMM-S-177.1 URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1644/11-MAMM-S-177.1
You have to love a paper where the scientists are the test subjects. Here, a guy named Roger tracked his movements for 65 random days during a sabbatical.
This results in figures such as this:
And bits like this: “That Roger did not envision distinct boundaries to his home range begs the question of whether other animals do.”
And this: “Does Roger’s concept of his own home range match any of the home ranges shown in Figs. 1–4? No, not exactly. The contoured home ranges include many places that Roger did not know at all, especially the houses of strangers.”
And this: “Using a home-range estimator can hide the nasty fact that a sample size sufficient to answer some uestions may not be adequate to answer other questions (also noted by Fieberg and Borger 2012).”
Although it seems funny on the surface, I actually love this sort of experiment. This is a lovely paper that addresses issues in modeling animal home-ranges/territories and digs into the definition and usability of the concept of a home-range. By using a human subject, it lets us actually talk to the mammal about his territory, and it adds nuance to the idea of what a territory is, how animals use and occupy space, and how we can adequately model those uses of space.
