Puppet resting behavior in the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii)

Abstract

Rest contributes a large part of animals’ daily life, and animals usually rest in two ways, standing or in recumbence. Small or medium sized ungulates bed to rest in most cases, and standing rest is very rare and hardly seen. Here we described a standing rest behavior of Tibetan antelopes (Pantholops hodgsonii) living on the Tibet Plateau which has not been reported before. We named the standing rest behavior Puppet behavior, since the antelope stand still for a certain time. Of the 304 individuals observed, 48.3% (98/203) of adult and sub-adult males expressed the Puppet behavior, whereas only 6.3% (6/96) of females did, indicating an obvious sexual difference. Puppet behavior occurred more frequently at noon and in the afternoon on sunny and cloudy days, meaning that daytime and weather were both influential factors. Puppet behavior was usually accompanied with rumination and sometimes ended with leg-shaking. Our results suggest that Puppet behavior may be an adaptive form of rest, which may serve a thermoregulatory and anti-predation function, and may be simpler and safer than recumbent rest.

Unpredictability of vigilance in two sympatric Tibetan ungulates

“…The resident status of Tibetan antelope can be divided into two types, the migratory population and the resident population. The population of Tibetan antelope in Shenzha is resident and does not migrate which might be up to 10,000 (Luo et al., 2018;Yang et al., 2018).…”

Action Recognition Using a Spatial-Temporal Network for Wild Felines

“…In [ 21 ], two binary-classifier support vector machines were performed in a hierarchical manner, but they could only make simple judgments, such as whether the pigs have aggressive behaviors. Luo et al [ 22 ] analyzed the behavior of Tibetan antelope (panthoops hodgsonii) in the Tibetan Plateau and was the first to call the behavior standing for a certain time as “puppet resting behavior”, which is an adaptive form of rest. Norouzzadeh et al [ 34 ] attempted to identify the species, to count the animals, to describe the animal behaviors, and to determine the presence of young.…”

“…The experimental dataset was developed from 3D scans of toy figurines in arbitrary poses. Bod’ová et al [ 22 ] proposed a probabilistic model of animal behavior that combined deterministic dynamics and stochastic switching between these states. In [ 23 ], two interacting ants were chosen as an example to capture a wide variety of complex individual and collective behaviors.…”

“…With the rise in computer vision and pattern recognition technology, impressive progress has been made in image classification [ 12 ] and object detection [ 13 ], motivating researchers to apply artificial intelligence for action recognition of animals, such as mice [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ], domestic animals (cows and pigs) [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ], Tibetan antelope [ 22 ], and ants [ 23 ]. However, some of these methods limit the research subjects to small animals in the laboratory [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ] while other methods usually make simple judgments about abnormal behaviors of animals [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Research on wild felines is extremely scarce.…”

Actinomyces wuliandei sp. nov., Corynebacterium liangguodongii sp. nov., Corynebacterium yudongzhengii sp. nov. and Oceanobacillus zhaokaii sp. nov., isolated from faeces of Tibetan antelope in the Qinghai-Tibet plateau of China

“…Famous as one of the global biodiversity 'hotspots' [22] because of its diverse geographical/topographic characteristics, the Qinghai-Tibet plateau is the highest plateau in the world with expansive planation surfaces, mountain ranges and basins [22][23][24]. Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii) is one of the characteristic animals of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, but whose population and distribution have been severely decreased in the late 20th century [25,26], although this trend was eventually reversed after a series of rigorous protection measures [27,28]. As part of a study on the microflora diversity of wild animals, we have previously isolated several novel bacterial species from Tibetan antelope on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau [10,[29][30][31].…”