ArticlePloS one2014
Lévy flights and self-similar exploratory behaviour of termite workers: beyond model fitting.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using semi-folded arenas to observe spontaneous emergence of collective trails in whole colonies of termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Article
- Nesting strategy reflects individual worker movement in termites.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Emergent dynamical phases and collective motion in termites.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 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
- Particle-environment interactions in arbitrary dimensions: A unifying analytic framework to model diffusion with inert spatial heterogeneities.Physical review research · 2023Article
- Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Functional duality in group criticality via ambiguous interactions.PLoS computational biology · 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
- Ant foragers might present variation and universal property in their movements.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2021Article
- Current status and future directions of Lévy walk research.Biology open · 2018Review
- Anomalous diffusion on the servosphere: A potential tool for detecting inherent organismal movement patterns.PloS one · 2017Article
- Scaling law in free walking of mice in circular open fields of various diameters.Journal of biological physics · 2016Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for movement patterns described by power-laws. Here we show by analyzing over half a million movement displacements that isolated termite workers actually exhibit a range of very interesting dynamical properties--including Lévy flights--in their exploratory behaviour. Going beyond the current trend of statistical model fitting alone, our study analyses anomalous diffusion and structure functions to estimate values of the scaling exponents describing displacement statistics. We evince the fractal nature of the movement patterns and show how the scaling exponents describing termite space exploration intriguingly comply with mathematical relations found in the physics of transport phenomena. By doing this, we rescue a rich variety of physical and biological phenomenology that can be potentially important and meaningful for the study of complex animal behavior and, in particular, for the study of how patterns of exploratory behaviour of individual social insects may impact not only their feeding demands but also nestmate encounter patterns and, hence, their dynamics at the social scale.
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