Some individual animals are really lazy. How do they get away with it?

Biologists who track animals often find there is one individual that sits around doing nothing for days at a time. How do these slackers survive?

By Michael Marshall

FOR Dani Rabaiotti, it all started with a study involving synthetic fox urine. The plan was to see if the stuff affected a fox’s territorial behaviour. Unfortunately, the study was a bust because the fox that was selected did almost nothing. For the entire three-month tracking period, it sat under a shed, leaving only twice: once to lead them “all around the houses”, and once to briefly nip into a neighbouring garden.

Rabaiotti, now at the Institute of Zoology in London, was reminded of that fox earlier this year, when the GPS signal from an African wild dog in Kenya that she was tracking suddenly stopped moving. Obviously, the animal might have died. But she was intrigued by an alternative explanation. Maybe, she thought, the wild dog 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.”

Soon, other 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 brief period in March, #LazyGeoff trended on Twitter. But why do some animals move so little? While answering the question is difficult, we are getting some helpful hints – and it turns out that acknowledging the existence of Lazy Geoffs could be vital for anyone studying animal behaviour.

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