Fish in Levy-flight foraging

摘要

Ecologists have long drawn inspiration from mathematics. Theory applied to population dynamics is one example. Another is the Levy-flight foraging hypothesis, which has been invoked to explain the strategies of organisms searching for food. Levy flights, or walks, are characterized by rare but extremely long 'step' lengths, and the same sites are revisited much less frequently than in a normal diffusion process. The existence of Levy flights as a foraging strategy has been the subject of controversy, but Humphries et al. (page 1066 of this issue) now report a notable advance. They have carried out a direct empirical test of the Levy-flight foraging hypothesis, using the largest animal-movement data set assembled for this purpose.