Some particular person animals are actually lazy. How do they get away with it?

Biologists who monitor animals usually discover there’s one person that sits round doing nothing for days at a time. How do these slackers survive?

By Michael Marshall

FOR Dani Rabaiotti, it began with a examine involving artificial fox urine. The plan was to see if the stuff affected a fox’s territorial behaviour. Sadly, the examine was a bust as a result of the fox that was chosen did virtually nothing. For the whole three-month monitoring interval, it sat underneath a shed, leaving solely twice: as soon as to steer them “all around the houses”, and as soon as to briefly nip right into a neighbouring backyard.

Rabaiotti, now on the Institute of Zoology in London, was reminded of that fox earlier this 12 months, when the GPS sign from an African wild canine in Kenya that she was monitoring instantly stopped transferring. Clearly, the animal may need died. However she was intrigued by an alternate clarification. Perhaps, she thought, the wild canine had “just decided to sit still”.

She turned to Twitter: “My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn’t ever do anything for reasons we don’t entirely understand.”

Quickly, different researchers chimed in. “Definitely tracks with one of the leopard cats I became familiar with in Borneo”; “Dudley the juvenile male Steller sea lion was a stand out!” For a quick interval in March, #LazyGeoff trended on Twitter. However why do some animals transfer so little? Whereas answering the query is tough, we’re getting some useful hints – and it seems that acknowledging the existence of Lazy Geoffs might be important for anybody learning animal behaviour.

There isn’t a scarcity of …