ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
How superdiffusion gets arrested: ecological encounters explain shift from Lévy to Brownian movement.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Physical crowding truncates intrinsic Lévy-like motility into caste-specific movement regimes in social termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Ants combine systematic meandering and correlated random walks when searching for unknown resources.iScience · 2023Article
- Scale-free movement patterns in termites emerge from social interactions and preferential attachments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The flight of the hornbill: drift and diffusion in arboreal avian movement.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Movement patterns of the grey field slug (Deroceras reticulatum) in an arable field.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Computational and experimental insights into the chemosensory navigation oProceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Optimal searching behaviour generated intrinsically by the central pattern generator for locomotion.eLife · 2019Article
- Resource distribution and internal factors interact to govern movement of a freshwater snail.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The evolutionary origins of Lévy walk foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Behavioral self-organization underlies the resilience of a coastal ecosystem.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- A random walk description of individual animal movement accounting for periods of rest.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Rationalizing spatial exploration patterns of wild animals and humans through a temporal discounting framework.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- T cell migration, search strategies and mechanisms.Nature reviews. Immunology · 2016Review
- Lévy Walks Suboptimal under Predation Risk.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
- Experimental evidence for inherent Lévy search behaviour in foraging animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Studying the movement behavior of benthic macroinvertebrates with automated video tracking.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
- Lévy flight movement patterns in marine predators may derive from turbulence cues.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2014Article
- Hierarchical random walks in trace fossils and the origin of optimal search behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- Scaling laws of ambush predator 'waiting' behaviour are tuned to a common ecology.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2014Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ecological theory uses Brownian motion as a default template for describing ecological movement, despite limited mechanistic underpinning. The generality of Brownian motion has recently been challenged by empirical studies that highlight alternative movement patterns of animals, especially when foraging in resource-poor environments. Yet, empirical studies reveal animals moving in a Brownian fashion when resources are abundant. We demonstrate that Einstein's original theory of collision-induced Brownian motion in physics provides a parsimonious, mechanistic explanation for these observations. Here, Brownian motion results from frequent encounters between organisms in dense environments. In density-controlled experiments, movement patterns of mussels shifted from Lévy towards Brownian motion with increasing density. When the analysis was restricted to moves not truncated by encounters, this shift did not occur. Using a theoretical argument, we explain that any movement pattern approximates Brownian motion at high-resource densities, provided that movement is interrupted upon encounters. Hence, the observed shift to Brownian motion does not indicate a density-dependent change in movement strategy but rather results from frequent collisions. Our results emphasize the need for a more mechanistic use of Brownian motion in ecology, highlighting that especially in rich environments, Brownian motion emerges from ecological interactions, rather than being a default movement pattern.
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