Scaling laws of marine predator search behaviour

By D. W. Sims, E. Southall, Nicolas E. Humphries, G. Hays, Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Jon W. Pitchford, Alex James, M. Z. Ahmed, A. Brierley, Mark A. Hindell and 8 more. Nature, 2008

960 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many free-ranging predators have to make foraging decisions with little, if any, knowledge of present resource distribution and availability. The optimal search strategy they should use to maximize encounter rates with prey in heterogeneous natural environments remains a largely unresolved issue in ecology. Lévy walks are specialized random walks giving rise to fractal movement trajectories that may represent an optimal solution for searching complex landscapes. However, the adaptive significance of this putative strategy in response to natural prey distributions remains untested. Here we analyse over a million movement displacements recorded from animal-attached electronic tags to show that diverse marine predators—sharks, bony fishes, sea turtles and penguins—exhibit Lévy-walk-like behaviour close to a theoretical optimum. Prey density distributions also display Lévy-like fractal patterns, suggesting response movements by predators to prey distributions. Simulations show that predators have higher encounter rates when adopting Lévy-type foraging in natural-like prey fields compared with purely random landscapes. This is consistent with the hypothesis that observed search patterns are adapted to observed statistical patterns of the landscape. This may explain why Lévy-like behaviour seems to be widespread among diverse organisms, from microbes to humans, as a ‘rule’ that evolved in response to patchy resource distributions.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Molecular Biology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2785e9bde96ff516f79311e72e1fb9bae311102b

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Citations in the corpus

The biology and ecology of the ocean sunfish Mola mola: a review of current knowledge and future research perspectives (2009, background): “Sightings of M. mola at temperate latitudes are more common in summer months (Sims and Southall 2002; Houghton et al. 2006a), a phenomenon seen with other large marine vertebrates, such as the leatherback turtle (Brongersma 1972; Houghton et al. 2006a) and the basking shark, Cetorhinus maximus ( Sim”
Aquatic animal telemetry: A panoramic window into the underwater world (2015, background): “This has stimulated investigations into the occurrence of optimal foraging strategies such as Lévy walks, whereby animals undertake fractal vertical movement trajectories to optimize searching complex and sparsely distributed prey fields (37).”
The role of learning in shark behaviour (2009, background): “Recent advances in telemetry techniques have enabled the movements of some free-ranging shark species to be recorded in their natural environments (Sims et al. 2008).”
Turn designation, sampling rate and the misidentification of power laws in movement path data using maximum likelihood estimates (2011, methodology): “2007; Edwards 2008) or an alternative method (Ramos-Fernándex et al. 2004; Reynolds and Frye 2007; Reynolds et al. 2007; Sims et al. 2008).”
Yo-yo vertical movements suggest a foraging strategy for tiger sharks Galeocerdo cuvier (2011, background): “For example, Sims et al. (2008) showed that the frequency distribution of vertical movements by pelagic predators agrees with the theoretical optimum for locating patchily distributed prey.”
Ecological and social factors affect the occurrence and outcomes of intergroup encounters in chimpanzees (2012, positive): “2011); lions spend more time in parts of their range where prey are more abundant (Spong 2002), and a wide range of marine predators follow travel patterns that appear to maximize the chance of encountering prey (Sims et al. 2008).”
An efficient modified grey wolf optimizer with Lévy flight for optimization tasks (2017, background): “Several theoretical works have demonstrated Lévy-based patterns in hunting of wildlife such as monkeys and sharks [45, 46, 52, 56-58].”
Understanding movements of organisms: it's time to abandon the Lévy foraging hypothesis (2015, methodology): “Subsequently, improved methods have been developed and adopted (Sims et al. 2008; Reynolds et al. 2009).”
Satellite tracking of the World's largest bony fish, the ocean sunfish (Mola mola L.) in the North East Atlantic (2009, neutral): “These movements might reflect prey searching (Sims et al., 2008).”
Effects of lunar cycle and fishing operations on longline-caught pelagic fish: fishing performance, capture time, and survival of fish (2010, background): “During the daytime, swordfish can spend most of their time at depths between 250 and 650 m (Canese et al., 2008) and as deep as 900 m (Takahashi et al., 2003).”
Evolutionary predictors of mammalian home range size: body mass, diet and the environment (2014, background): “Moreover, as the marine system is fluid with few boundaries to limit movement, food resources tend to be highly mobile across the ecosystem (Sims et al., 2008).”