Seeking Search-Engine-Fu [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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If I wanted to find out how much area a typical (wild) individual of a given species covers (not thinking of migrations so much as daily/weekly wandering, hunting/grazing patterns, etc.), what term or phrase would a zoologist use that I might Google for? (The first that comes to mind is "range", but that would usually mean the geographical area over which individuals of a species are found, not the size of the area one individual inhabits, right?)

At the moment the animal I'm wondering about is the Leopard Gecko, but I know I'm going to have the same question about other critters sooner or later...

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There are 14 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

How about "territory"?

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Hmm. So far that mostly gets me references to the fact that they'll fight over territory, but only one reference to what I want to know, and that reference is a guess based on casual observation of one pet. *sigh* 'Twas a word I hadn't thought of searching on before though.

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I think territory is the word you need though, hope your searches prove more fruitful, sometimes a combination of words works better though I'm too sleepy to proffer any suggestions of same right now..

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It comes up a lot in discussions of how much acreage of old-growth forest an individual (or breeding pair) of a given species needs. (It also comes up, in discussion of humans, in the sense of "Each American consumes the resources from N acres of the planet," etc.)

Hmmm.

*Googles*

It appears that "home range" is what you're looking for. :)

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Ah -- thanks. Yup, that looks like it. (It also look like the answer for leopard geckos is "we don't know".) Knowing the search phrase is going to come in handy ... and I'd say that about 70% of my search-engine trouble comes down to not knowing the jargon I need to search on. (Which is why I have less trouble searching for information in my own field.)

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Hm, with Leopard Gekkos it's really hard to tell, because:
1) With any given individual within a species, it's really hard to tell: all depends on that particular animal's circumstances.
2) Individual territory for most species is unknown. There are some for which we have some good idea, but that sort of information requires tracking individuals over the long-term, and people hav en't done it.
3) Leopard gekkos are a widely-kept pet species, so data that is available usually comes from obervance of individuals kept as pets, which may or may not have anything relationship to how they behave in the wild.

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It did occur to me when I first started wondering, that the studies might not have been done. When I got around to posting my question I'd forgotten to worry about how to tell the difference between "nobody knows yet" and "I'm using the wrong search terms to find it." Hmm. A metaproblem in web searching.

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In rasing cattle, the term is 'acreage per cow' (ie, about 2 in eastern pasture and 5 in the west). Also expressed as 'cow per acre'. I've seen it referred to as the 'domain' of an animal. Another term to use could possibly be 'sustain'; a quick search for 'gecko space sustain' turned up a document with the phrase: "Despite their hunting capabilities, the dragons still operate on the relatively low overheads of the lizard metabolism and do not need to eat every day, or even every week. Therefore these islands, which possess a fairly stable prey population of wild pigs, deer and other animals, can easily sustain the known population of about five thousand dragons." That's referring to Komodo dragons, but that's the search that let me know that that would be a starter term for the search; you can sort through that or refine it at will.

Sadly nobody pays me to do random searches for this, because I'm pretty good at it; I could likely have your info for you in an hour to an hour and a half (I once found a cd for

tafkar based on it being bhangra techno and she'd seen the cover a few weeks earlier and described it). I am very good at this for no reason that I can understand. :-)

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Perhaps you could teach classes to the rest of us "search challanged" people. :)

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don't think I can, though. See, the way this search went, I thought "Hmm. I was reading about that a couple hours ago, though it was in terms of space allotment for cattle. How did they refer to that? (grab book, riffle through it) Ok, just 'you need to figure 5 acres per cow here.' Ok, let's feed 'acres per cow' into Google. Oh, look, that turns up a lot of stuff related to 'acreage per cow' instead. let's see how that does. Ok, lots more, and lots of PDFs from the government; that's more likely the official type term. Ok, then, let's toss acreage into Dictionary.com's thesaurus, see if that comes up with anything. Oh, domain. That's a good one. Let's see. 'domain support gecko'. Hmm. Not quite right, but...Oh! That google snippet for that page refers to 'sustain'. Much more likely to be that. More scientific sounding word. 'gecko space sustain'. Well, there's a quote that indicates this is likely the right path, I'll give him that."

This is dull, and suppositional, and I'm not sure I could actually explain to people how I skim 20 result summaries and pull out an idea from there and say 'aha!', and it also has to do with Sheer Amount of Crap in Stephanie's Brain that makes me say "hey, they were discussing something similar to that in an incindental, throw away conversation in that book earlier..."

So basically, I'd need to learn how to teach people how to have a brain that makes connections as randomly as mine does.

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This is exactly how I do it, too, and I also find the intuitive part hard to explain. It's a matter of saying "You just go with the idea that feels right" and I admit that is unsatisfying as wither student or teacher.

I'd also love to be paid for this ability. :-)

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Doesn't google have a searcher service you can register for? Or did they cancel it? Then you'd get paid for it.

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http://answers.google.com/answers/

Unfortunately, they are currently not hiring.

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National Geographic TV documentaries use "territory".

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