ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2012
Foraging success of biological Lévy flights recorded in situ.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 87 papers.
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Who cites it
87 citing papers in PubMed.
- Marine radar reveals novel group foraging patterns in pelagic seabirds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Improving prediction region accuracy in marine animal movement with temporal fusion transformer.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Nonequilibrium hyperuniform states in active turbulence.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Catastrophic storms, forest disturbance, and the natural history of Swainson's warbler.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Peritumoral brain zone in glioblastoma: biological, clinical and mechanical features.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Review
- Lévy movements and a slowly decaying memory allow efficient collective learning in groups of interacting foragers.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Physics of diffusion in viral genome evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Variation in foraging activity influences area-restricted search behaviour by bottlenose dolphins.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Using a behavior random permutation model to identify displacement grooming in ungulates.Current zoology · 2023Article
- Honey bees infer source location from the dances of returning foragers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Characteristics of daily foraging activity of Camponotus japonicus via time series analysis.PloS one · 2023Article
- Understanding the structure of cognitive noise.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Attaining the recesses of the cognitive space.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2022Article
- The role of context in elucidating drivers of animal movement.Ecology and evolution · 2022Review
- Foraging behavior in visual search: A review of theoretical and mathematical models in humans and animals.Psychological research · 2022Review
- The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Intrinsic and environmental factors modulating autonomous robotic search under high uncertainty.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Objective comparison of methods to decode anomalous diffusion.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Specialization of a mobile, apex predator affects trophic coupling among adjacent habitats.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Linked surveillance and genetic data uncovers programmatically relevant geographic scale of Guinea worm transmission in Chad.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2021Article
27 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is an open question how animals find food in dynamic natural environments where they possess little or no knowledge of where resources are located. Foraging theory predicts that in environments with sparsely distributed target resources, where forager knowledge about resources' locations is incomplete, Lévy flight movements optimize the success of random searches. However, the putative success of Lévy foraging has been demonstrated only in model simulations. Here, we use high-temporal-resolution Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking of wandering (Diomedea exulans) and black-browed albatrosses (Thalassarche melanophrys) with simultaneous recording of prey captures, to show that both species exhibit Lévy and Brownian movement patterns. We find that total prey masses captured by wandering albatrosses during Lévy movements exceed daily energy requirements by nearly fourfold, and approached yields by Brownian movements in other habitats. These results, together with our reanalysis of previously published albatross data, overturn the notion that albatrosses do not exhibit Lévy patterns during foraging, and demonstrate that Lévy flights of predators in dynamic natural environments present a beneficial alternative strategy to simple, spatially intensive behaviors. Our findings add support to the possibility that biological Lévy flight may have naturally evolved as a search strategy in response to sparse resources and scant information.
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