Application+of+random+walks+to+foraging+strategies

Lévy Flight

 * step distance is drawn from a statistical distribution with a power-law tail (Viswanathan et al 1999)
 * Lévy flight less likely to return to previously visited site compared to gaussian distribution; alternatively, the number of newly visited sites is greater for N Lévy walkers compared to N brownian walkers (Viswanathan et al 1999)
 * this makes the Lévy pattern more efficient when resources are sparsely and randomly distributed
 * application of Lévy flight found to be inappropriate for range of species; instead, a shifted gamma (Albatross), exponential (deer), or none (bee) (Edwards et al 2007)
 * questions applicability of optimal search strategy

Related Articles
code @article{reynolds2009lévy, title={The L{\'e}vy flight paradigm: random search patterns and mechanisms}, author={Reynolds, AM and Rhodes, CJ}, journal={Ecology}, volume={90}, number={4}, pages={877--887}, year={2009}, publisher={Eco Soc America} }

code code @article{viswanathan1999optimizing, title={Optimizing the success of random searches}, author={Viswanathan, GM and Buldyrev, S.V. and Havlin, S. and Da Luz, MGE and Raposo, EP and Stanley, H.E.}, journal={Nature}, volume={401}, number={6756}, pages={911--914}, year={1999}, publisher={Nature Publishing Group} } code