ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Experimental evidence for inherent Lévy search behaviour in foraging animals.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- A multi-species model for goose management: Competition and facilitation drive space use of foraging geese.Ambio · 2026Article
- Article
- The role of signal in saltatory pursuit of cryptic stationary targets.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- A guide to area-restricted search: a foundational foraging behaviour.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 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
- The scent of fear makes sea urchins go ballistic.Movement ecology · 2021Article
- A new approach to assessing the space use behavior of macroinvertebrates by automated video tracking.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Efficient Lévy walks in virtual human foraging.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Sediment availability provokes a shift from Brownian to Lévy-like clonal expansion in a dune building grass.Ecology letters · 2021Article
- Seed dispersal as a search strategy: dynamic and fragmented landscapes select for multi-scale movement strategies in plants.Movement ecology · 2021Article
- Movement patterns of the grey field slug (Deroceras reticulatum) in an arable field.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- 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
- Lévy-like movement patterns of metastatic cancer cells revealed in microfabricated systems and implicated in vivo.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Evidence for encounter-conditional, area-restricted search in a preliminary study of Colombian blowgun hunters.PloS one · 2018Article
- The evolutionary origins of Lévy walk foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- The Weierstrassian movement patterns of snails.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Optimizing mating encounters by sexually dimorphic movements.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recently, Lévy walks have been put forward as a new paradigm for animal search and many cases have been made for its presence in nature. However, it remains debated whether Lévy walks are an inherent behavioural strategy or emerge from the animal reacting to its habitat. Here, we demonstrate signatures of Lévy behaviour in the search movement of mud snails (Hydrobia ulvae) based on a novel, direct assessment of movement properties in an experimental set-up using different food distributions. Our experimental data uncovered clusters of small movement steps alternating with long moves independent of food encounter and landscape complexity. Moreover, size distributions of these clusters followed truncated power laws. These two findings are characteristic signatures of mechanisms underlying inherent Lévy-like movement. Thus, our study provides clear experimental evidence that such multi-scale movement is an inherent behaviour rather than resulting from the animal interacting with its environment.
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