ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Scaling laws of ambush predator 'waiting' behaviour are tuned to a common ecology.
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 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- The hunter or the hunted? Inferring benthic meso-predator behavior from swim velocity data.PeerJ · 2026Article
- Nesting strategy reflects individual worker movement in termites.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Article
- Movement patterns and habitat use for the sympatric species:Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- Efficient Lévy walks in virtual human foraging.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Diversity of biological rhythm and food web stability.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Post-contact immobility and half-lives that save lives.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Optimal searching behaviour generated intrinsically by the central pattern generator for locomotion.eLife · 2019Article
- Adaptive switch to sexually dimorphic movements by partner-seeking termites.Science advances · 2019Article
- Current status and future directions of Lévy walk research.Biology open · 2018Review
- Understanding the spatiotemporal pattern of grazing cattle movement.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Lévy patterns in seabirds are multifaceted describing both spatial and temporal patterning.Frontiers in zoology · 2016Article
- Lévy Walks Suboptimal under Predation Risk.PLoS computational biology · 2015Article
- Experimental evidence for inherent Lévy search behaviour in foraging animals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Evidence for a pervasive 'idling-mode' activity template in flying and pedestrian insects.Royal Society open science · 2015Article
- Settlement-Size Scaling among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems in the New World.PloS one · 2015Article
- 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
- Lévy flights and self-similar exploratory behaviour of termite workers: beyond model fitting.PloS one · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The decisions animals make about how long to wait between activities can determine the success of diverse behaviours such as foraging, group formation or risk avoidance. Remarkably, for diverse animal species, including humans, spontaneous patterns of waiting times show random 'burstiness' that appears scale-invariant across a broad set of scales. However, a general theory linking this phenomenon across the animal kingdom currently lacks an ecological basis. Here, we demonstrate from tracking the activities of 15 sympatric predator species (cephalopods, sharks, skates and teleosts) under natural and controlled conditions that bursty waiting times are an intrinsic spontaneous behaviour well approximated by heavy-tailed (power-law) models over data ranges up to four orders of magnitude. Scaling exponents quantifying ratios of frequent short to rare very long waits are species-specific, being determined by traits such as foraging mode (active versus ambush predation), body size and prey preference. A stochastic-deterministic decision model reproduced the empirical waiting time scaling and species-specific exponents, indicating that apparently complex scaling can emerge from simple decisions. Results indicate temporal power-law scaling is a behavioural 'rule of thumb' that is tuned to species' ecological traits, implying a common pattern may have naturally evolved that optimizes move-wait decisions in less predictable natural environments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.