Lévy walk patterns in the foraging movements of spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi)

By Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez, José L. Mateos, Octavio Miramontes, Germinal Cocho, Hernán Larralde, Bárbara Ayala-Orozco. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2003

511 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scale invariant patterns have been found in different biological systems, in many cases resembling what physicists have found in other, nonbiological systems. Here we describe the foraging patterns of free-ranging spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in the forest of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico and find that these patterns closely resemble what physicists know as Lévy walks. First, the length of a trajectory’s constituent steps, or continuous moves in the same direction, is best described by a power-law distribution in which the frequency of ever larger steps decreases as a negative power function of their length. The rate of this decrease is very close to that predicted by a previous analytical Lévy walk model to be an optimal strategy to search for scarce resources distributed at random. Second, the frequency distribution of the duration of stops or waiting times also approximates to a power-law function. Finally, the mean square displacement during the monkeys’ first foraging trip increases more rapidly than would be expected from a random walk with constant step length, but within the range predicted for Lévy walks. In view of these results, we analyze the different exponents characterizing the trajectories described by females and males, and by monkeys on their own and when part of a subgroup. We discuss the origin of these patterns and their implications for the foraging ecology of spider monkeys.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c13434c70d922674b22bb04811d353101987c40

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Citations in the corpus

Patch density determines movement patterns and foraging efficiency of large herbivores (2007, background): “As in other studies (Levandowsky et al. 1988; Cole 1995; Schuster and Levandowsky 1996; Viswanathan et al. 1996; Viswanathan et al. 1999; Atkinson et al. 2002; Mårell et al. 2002; Bartumeus et al. 2003; Ramos-Fernández et al. 2004), the observed flight length distributions could be well explained by”
On the Levy-Walk Nature of Human Mobility (2008, background): “Biologists [1], [2], [3] have found that the mobility patterns of foraging animals such as spider monkey, albatrosses (seabirds) and jackals can be commonly described in what physicists have long called Levy Walks.”
Turn designation, sampling rate and the misidentification of power laws in movement path data using maximum likelihood estimates (2011, methodology): “We stress that our results do not necessarily contradict previous studies that have identified Levy walks in empirical data using either the maximum likelihood method (Edwards et al. 2007; Edwards 2008) or an alternative method ( Ramos-Fernandex et al. 2004; Reynolds and Frye 2007; Reynolds et al. ”
A complex social structure with fission–fusion properties can emerge from a simple foraging model (2005, unknown): “Rule (b) was set according to the typical foraging trajectories of 153 spider monkeys and other primates, who seldom retrace their own steps but rather visit a 154 large number of distinct feeding sources before returning to a previously visited one 155 (Milton 2000; Ramos-Fernández et al. 2004).”
Time as a constraint on group size in spider monkeys (2006, unknown): “Furthermore, there might be foraging advantages, such as more efficient travel routes, to forming larger parties in spider monkeys (Ramos-Fernandez et al. 2004).”
L\'evy walks (2014, methodology): “Several kinds of animals were tracked by this method: baboons (Schreier and Grove, 2014), spider monkeys (Ramos-Fernández et al., 2004), fallow deer (Focardi et al.”
Understanding individual human mobility patterns (2008, background): “Indeed, early measurements on albatrosses, bumblebees, deer and monkeys [9, 10] and more recent ones on marine predators [11] suggested that animal trajectory is approxi mated by a Lévy flight [12, 13], a random walk whose step size ∆r follows a power-law distributionP (∆r) ∼ ∆r with β < 2.”