(Inside Science) — In 2012 and 2013, Bill Bateman, a zoologist based in Perth, Australia, began to notice something interesting about how animals were navigating the bush: When mining companies created small paths through the previously tangled environment to install seismic lines, animals started preferentially using those trails to move from one place to another.

And animal ingenuity wasn’t confined to walking on beaten paths.

“The more we looked, the more evidence there was that