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 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”.
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She turned to Twitter: “ 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. For a brief period in March, 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.
There is no shortage of animals that seemingly do nothing. Although sloths are famous for it, they aren’t alone. Take the olm, a kind of salamander that lives in European caves. A few years ago, researchers found one in exactly the same spot they had last seen it in seven years earlier – though it might have budged while they weren’t looking.
But we can understand why these animals don’t move much. Sloths have adapted to eat poor-quality food that takes months to digest, while olms are “sit-and-wait” predators that target crustaceans that are rare in the olms’ caves. In circumstances like this, it makes sense to move slowly or not at all.
Lazy Geoffs are different: they are animals that should move, but don’t. Sometimes, there is a prosaic explanation. For instance, it turned out that Rabaiotti’s wild dog was still moving, but no longer transmitting a signal because of a flat battery in its GPS collar. But other Lazy Geoffs really do specialise in staying put. A study published earlier this year provided more confirmation of their existence. It analysed results from 41 tracking studies of various mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians, concluding that that are consistent over time.
Animal personalities
Maybe personality type in a more general sense explains why some animals have so little get-up-and-go. Animal personality researchers , such as how shy or bold they are, whether they prefer to explore or avoid a situation, and their aggressiveness – and there are hints that at least some of these might affect the amount they move.
For example, Benjamin Toscano at Trinity College in Connecticut and his colleagues have unpublished data on how snails respond to the risk of predators. “We take a snail and we tap it with tweezers and then we put it down in a cup,” he says. When tapped, the snails retreat into their shells. “Then we just start a timer and say, how long does it take for that snail to come back out of the shell and resume its normal snail life?” Most emerge within tens of seconds, he says, but some hide for many minutes – indicating a preference to avoid rather than explore a situation.
“In humans, we’ve got these big five axes of behavioural variation,” says Kimberley Mathot at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. They are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. A person’s scores across these five traits are meant to predict their behaviours.
It is tempting to think that inactive animals simply aren’t conscientious: they don’t move even though they know they ought to. However, Mathot says we can’t make inferences about the cognitive processes underlying Lazy Geoff-like behaviour unless an experiment is explicitly designed to explore that – and none to date has been.
An alternative is that Lazy Geoffs owe their inactivity to physiology. Some animals , meaning they digest food at different rates and expend energy faster or slower. It seems plausible to imagine that .
However, the links between metabolism and activity levels are complicated, says Mathot. In 2018, she and her colleagues published an , combining data from more than 8000 individual animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, that had been studied in more than 70 previously published analyses. Some behaviours, such as maximum running speed, did correlate with basal metabolic rate. But others, including levels of activity and exploration, showed no relationship.
Do humans make animals lazier?
In fact, it turns out that, in at least some situations, Lazy Geoffs might owe their existence to our human-dominated world. A study published in 2018 compiled GPS tracking data for 803 individuals across 57 mammal species, including elephants, anteaters and baboons. It found that mammals living in areas with a high human footprint as those living in areas with a low human footprint.
The authors initially interpreted this as the result of negative impacts from roads or other barriers to movement. However, a follow-up study two years later suggested an alternative explanation. It found that and have smaller ranges. “It’s because they get loads of food in cities and they don’t need to go very far,” says Rabaiotti. Her slothful fox may be an example of this. “It’s quite common for people to feed foxes here [in the UK],” she says.
Rabaiotti thinks there is a lesson in all of this. When tracking animal behaviour, it is necessary to study a large sample so that the results aren’t unduly influenced by the occasional Lazy Geoff. “There are a lot of animal movement studies out there where they only have one or two individuals,” says Rabaiotti. “It’s important to bear in mind that [those individuals] might just be a bit weird.”
Are these animals genuinely lazy, though? “I googled the definition,” says Mathot. “It’s ‘an unwillingness to expend energy’.” That, she says, is a testable hypothesis. However, she says “lazy” is generally used as an insult, which is the wrong way to look at it. “My guess would be that if we looked at these animals, in a lot of cases they’re going to be doing little because it’s the right choice for them, and if they did more, it wouldn’t have better payoffs.”
Rabaiotti has a similar view, but she is nevertheless OK with the word. Barring some domestic dogs that were bred to be energetic, animals don’t expend calories unless they have to, she says. “Most animals, at their heart, are lazy.”
