Addax Desert Migration Lab (2D)

This 2D companion strips the addax's migration behavior down to the resource economics that actually drive it. A herd moves across a desert of scattered forage clumps and a handful of sparse, slow-regenerating waterholes, spending energy to travel and gaining hydration and energy back by grazing. The key biological detail is the threshold at which an animal breaks off to find a waterhole: a typical desert grazer heads for water at a fairly high hydration level, but addax tolerate far lower hydration first, because they draw a large share of their water directly from the moisture in the plants they eat. That single difference is what lets the herd range — and migrate — across distances a less water-independent grazer could not survive. The season slider changes how much moisture the forage itself carries, reshaping how far and how often the herd needs to detour toward a waterhole.