4/4/25 Mia Elbon: Do animals go as far as they can, or as far as they have to?
Neuroscience Brown Bag
Mia Elbon
Graduate Student
Date: Friday, April 4th, 2025
Time: 1:25-2:15pm
Location: Wilson Hall 316
Do animals go as far as they can, or as far as they have to?
An animal’s “home range” is the surface area where it can normally be found over a given time.
Larger animals have larger home ranges, which may result from a need for more energy, from
the ability to cover longer distances per unit time, or both. Whatever determines the size of an
animal’s home range, representing that space might constitute an advantage that imposes
selective pressure for a commensurate number of hippocampal neurons across species. In that
case, a requisite finding is a positive and universal correlation between home range and
number of hippocampal neurons. We compiled a dataset of home ranges for 342 mammalian
species, and compared home range against known body mass, metabolic rates, cortical
neuron counts, and hippocampal neuron counts. We show that the number of hippocampal
neurons is not a universal predictor of home range: in particular, primates have smaller home
ranges, whereas aquatic carnivores have far larger home ranges, than predicted for their
numbers of hippocampal neurons. Our findings show that having a larger home range does not
require more hippocampal neurons, and suggest that primates have a higher discriminatory
ability when mentally representing their home range – or “spatial representational resolution”–,
whereas aquatic carnivores have reduced spatial resolution, whilst obviously capable of
navigating their environment. Interestingly, we find that neither body mass nor energy
expenditure explains home range universally, which begs the question: Do animals go as far as
they can, or as far as they have to?