Mussels realize Weierstrassian Lévy walks as composite correlated random walks

Composite correlated random walks (CCRW) have been posited as a potential replacement for Lévy walks and it has also been suggested that CCRWs have been mistaken for Lévy walks. Here I test an alternative, emerging hypothesis: namely that some organisms approximate Lévy walks as an innate CCRW. It i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2014-03, Vol.4 (1), p.4409-4409, Article 4409
Main Author: Reynolds, Andy M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/1647/2198
631/181/2468
Animals
Behavior, Animal
Computer Simulation
Humanities and Social Sciences
Models, Biological
multidisciplinary
Mytilus edulis - physiology
Science
Walking - physiology
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Summary:Composite correlated random walks (CCRW) have been posited as a potential replacement for Lévy walks and it has also been suggested that CCRWs have been mistaken for Lévy walks. Here I test an alternative, emerging hypothesis: namely that some organisms approximate Lévy walks as an innate CCRW. It is shown that the tri-modal CCRW found to describe accurately the movement patterns of mussels ( Mytilus edulis ) during spatial pattern formation in mussel beds can be regarded as being the first three levels in a hierarchy of nested movement patterns which if extended indefinitely would correspond to a Lévy walk whose characteristic (power-law) exponent is tuned to nearly minimize the time required to form patterned beds. The mussels realise this Lévy walk to good approximation across a biologically meaningful range of scales. This demonstrates that the CCRW not only describes mussel movement patterns, it explains them.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep04409