Search for Food of Birds, Fish, and Insects

Abstract

This is a brief review about the question of whether biologically relevant search strategies can be identified by statistical data analysis and mathematical modeling. A famous paradigm in this field is the Lévy hypothesis. It states that under certain conditions, Lévy flights, which are a key concept in stochastic anomalous dynamics, provide an optimal search strategy for foraging organisms. This hypothesis may be understood biologically as the claim that Lévy flights represent an evolutionary adaptive optimal search strategy for foraging organisms. Another interpretation, however, is that Lévy flights emerge from the interaction between forager and a given (scale-free) distribution of food sources. This hypothesis is discussed very controversially in the current literature. Examples and counterexamples of experimental data and their analyses, confirming and refuting it, will be given.