Arboreal gaits in three sympatric rodents Apodemus agrarius,Apodemus flavicollis (Rodentia,Muridae) and Myodes glareolus (Rodentia,Cricetidae)

Vertical stratification of the arboreal habitat allows the coexistence of several species in a given area, because the complex arboreal strata can be used in different ways by arboreal and scansorial mammals. The present report experimentally investigated the gait metrics on different arboreal substrates, of three sympatric rodents living in a deciduous forest in Poznań, Poland. Arboreal locomotion was compared between the burrowing striped field mouse, Apodemus agrarius, the scansorial bank vole, Myodes glareolus, and the more arboreal yellow-necked mouse, Apodemus flavicollis. We filmed two wild-caught individuals from each species walking on four different substrate diameters (2 mm, 5 mm, 10 mm, 25 mm) and three different inclinations (45° descending, horizontal, 45° ascending) at 240 fps and collected a set of gait parameters from a total of 273 complete cycles. Our results did not demonstrate clear relationships between arboreal locomotion and the ecology of the three species. Only A. flavicollis exhibited locomotor features partly associated with arboreal competence, including lower velocity and diagonality on narrow substrates and asymmetrical gaits on wider ones. On the other hand, the two Apodemus species, despite their different ecologies, shared a few locomotor similarities, such as velocity regulation primarily by stride frequency, and similar effects of substrate size and inclination on diagonality, duty factor, and duty factor index indicating the possibility of a phylogenetic signal. Because the selected gait parameters provided limited insight into the ability of small mammals to move competently through an arboreal habitat, these findings indicate that the relationship between behaviour and ecology is complex.