Fig. 2

Examples of posture and energy-linked posture visualised for two contrasting species (a human and a fish) over 24 h. The human data are taken from a person on a walking/camping tour while the fish data are from a hole-dwelling reef species that often rests by wedging itself at unusual angles. The left hand figures (a) show spherical histogram (Dubai) plots, indicating how time is allocated to different body postures [the ‘North pole’ position shows the species in the ‘normal’ upright position]. The first right-hand figure for each species (b) shows how each posture is linked to varying putative power levels. Note how the human has higher power-proxy levels associated with the vertical posture due to walking. Both the human and the fish have low power-proxy levels at low ‘latitude’ angles acquired during resting/sleep, exemplified by the large diameter blue discs. Data normalized to give a global percentage for all angles may hide infrequent, but higher-energy, activities. Normalising the data to 100 % per facet (c) highlights these though. In this case, the low-energy life style of the fish is still apparent (cf. B), with higher energies occurring fleetingly and only when the fish is vertical (white arrow). The colour coding has blue as low, and red as high, values