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Article: The biology of movement.(research on mammals' movements)
- Article from:
- Animals
- Article date:
- December 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Biologists were perplexed. The two rabbit species looked nearly identical and seemed to inhabit identical habitats. But one--the eastern cottontail, an introduced interloper--was pushing out the native species, the New England cottontail. No one knew why.
This is the question that Gus Smith tackled for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The answer, he was to find, lay not in the brushy fields--overgrown with multiflora rose, dogwood saplings, and autumn olive--where both species lived but in the differing ways the two rabbit species saw the landscape.
What does a given landscape look like to a nonhuman mammal? "It may look ...