Intrinsic Lévy behaviour in organisms – searching for a mechanism: Comment on “Liberating Lévy walk research from the shackles of optimal foraging” by A.M. Reynolds

The seminal papers by Viswanathan and colleagues in the late 1990s [1] and [2] proposed not only that scale-free, superdiffusive Lévy walks can describe the free-ranging movement patterns observed in animals such as the albatross [1], but that the Lévy walk was optimal for searching for sparsely and randomly distributed resource targets [2]. This distinct advantage, now shown to be present over a much broader set of conditions than originally theorised [3], implied that the Lévy walk is a search strategy that should be found very widely in organisms [4]. In the years since there have been several influential empirical studies showing that Lévy walks can indeed be detected in the movement patterns of a very broad range of taxa, from jellyfish, insects, fish, reptiles, seabirds, humans [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] and [10], and even in the fossilised trails of extinct invertebrates [11]. The broad optimality and apparent deep evolutionary origin of movement (search) patterns that are well approximated by Lévy walks led to the development of the Lévy flight foraging (LFF) hypothesis [12], which states that “since Lévy flights and walks can optimize search efficiencies, therefore natural selection should have led to adaptations for Lévy flight foraging”.

Lévy walks, Lévy flights, Anomalous diffusion, Movement ecology, Neurobiology, Foraging, Scale-free, Power laws

10.1016/j.plrev.2015.06.002

1571-0645

111-114

Sims, David W.

7234b444-25e2-4bd5-8348-a1c142d0cf81

September 2015

Sims, David W.

7234b444-25e2-4bd5-8348-a1c142d0cf81

Sims, David W. (2015) Intrinsic Lévy behaviour in organisms – searching for a mechanism: Comment on “Liberating Lévy walk research from the shackles of optimal foraging” by A.M. Reynolds. Physics of Life Reviews, 14, 111-114. (doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2015.06.002).