Why do many animals move with a predominance of roughly forward directions?

Abstract

Animal movements can influence their ecology and demographics. Animal movements are often characterized by path structures with directional persistence. The extent to which directional persistence improves forage success is investigated in this paper using theoretical simulations. It is shown that a movement strategy with directional persistence enables simulated animals to find more forage as compared to a random movement strategy. Situations where resources are chosen with certainty (optimally) are even more successful. Choosing resource with certainty cannot result in directional persistence. However, in cases where animals choose with certainty adjacent cells with resource but continue in their existing direction if none of these have resources then results include directional persistence. It is posited here that this combined strategy is the most effective because if optimal foraging works it is optimally efficient but where foraging is sub-optimal, for a variety of reasons, directional persistence will benefit foraging.