ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Hierarchical random walks in trace fossils and the origin of optimal search behavior.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 113 citations in OpenAlex.
- Investigating category transitions and interresponse times in fluency tasks.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Smoothness analyses of trace fossils: expanding quantitative toolkits to unravel bilaterian movement ecology during the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Size-dependent self-avoidance enables superdiffusive migration in macroscopic unicellulars.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Intermittent and temporally variable bioturbation by some terrestrial invertebrates: implications for ichnology.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- The scent of fear makes sea urchins go ballistic.Movement ecology · 2021Article
- Weierstrassian Lévy walks are a by-product of crawling.The European physical journal. E, Soft matter · 2021Article
- Heavy-tailed distributions in haptic perception of wielded rods.Experimental brain research · 2021Article
- Quantifying people's experience during flood events with implications for hazard risk communication.PloS one · 2021Article
- The growth and form of knowledge networks by kinesthetic curiosity.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2020Article
- Optimal searching behaviour generated intrinsically by the central pattern generator for locomotion.eLife · 2019Article
- Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2019Article
- Inferring collective behaviour from a fossilized fish shoal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- SiMRiv: an R package for mechanistic simulation of individual, spatially-explicit multistate movements in rivers, heterogeneous and homogeneous spaces incorporating landscape bias.Movement ecology · 2019Article
- Lévy-like movement patterns of metastatic cancer cells revealed in microfabricated systems and implicated in vivo.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Optimal random search using limited spatial memory.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- The optimal movement patterns for mating encounters with sexually asymmetric detection ranges.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Current status and future directions of Lévy walk research.Biology open · 2018Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
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Abstract
Efficient searching is crucial for timely location of food and other resources. Recent studies show that diverse living animals use a theoretically optimal scale-free random search for sparse resources known as a Lévy walk, but little is known of the origins and evolution of foraging behavior and the search strategies of extinct organisms. Here, using simulations of self-avoiding trace fossil trails, we show that randomly introduced strophotaxis (U-turns)--initiated by obstructions such as self-trail avoidance or innate cueing--leads to random looping patterns with clustering across increasing scales that is consistent with the presence of Lévy walks. This predicts that optimal Lévy searches may emerge from simple behaviors observed in fossil trails. We then analyzed fossilized trails of benthic marine organisms by using a novel path analysis technique and find the first evidence, to our knowledge, of Lévy-like search strategies in extinct animals. Our results show that simple search behaviors of extinct animals in heterogeneous environments give rise to hierarchically nested Brownian walk clusters that converge to optimal Lévy patterns. Primary productivity collapse and large-scale food scarcity characterizing mass extinctions evident in the fossil record may have triggered adaptation of optimal Lévy-like searches. The findings suggest that Lévy-like behavior has been used by foragers since at least the Eocene but may have a more ancient origin, which might explain recent widespread observations of such patterns among modern taxa.
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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.