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Article
Open AccessWhy insect swarms seem unduly complicated
Mating swarms of flying male insects are a form of collective behaviour, albeit one different from flocks and schools as they do not display ordered collective movements. In recent years, much progress has bee...
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Article
Open AccessMosquito swarms shear harden
Recently Cavagna et al. (Sci Rep 13(1): 8745, 2023) documented the swarming behaviors of laboratory-based Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes. Here key observations from this 3D-video tracking study are reproduced by a ...
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Article
Open AccessUnderstanding the thermodynamic properties of insect swarms
Sinhuber et al. (Sci Rep 11:3773, 2021) formulated an equation of state for laboratory swarms of the non-biting midge Chironomus riparius that holds true when the swarms are driven through thermodynamic cycles by...
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Article
Weierstrassian Lévy walks are a by-product of crawling
Weierstrassian Lévy walks are one of the simplest random walks which do not satisfy the central limit theorem and have come to epitomize scale invariance even though they were initially regarded as being a mat...
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Article
Intrinsic stochasticity and the emergence of collective behaviours in insect swarms
Intrinsic stochasticity associated with finite population size is fundamental to the emergence of collective behaviours in insect swarms. It has been assumed that this intrinsic stochasticity is purely additiv...
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Article
Open AccessLinking Small-Scale Flight Manoeuvers and Density Profiles to the Vertical Movement of Insects in the Nocturnal Stable Boundary Layer
Huge numbers of insects migrate over considerable distances in the stably-stratified night-time atmosphere with great consequences for ecological processes, biodiversity, ecosystem services and pest management...
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Article
Open AccessIncorporating terminal velocities into Lagrangian stochastic models of particle dispersal in the atmospheric boundary layer
Lagrangian stochastic models for simulation of tracer-particle trajectories in turbulent flows can be adapted for simulation of particle trajectories. This is conventionally done by replacing the zero-mean fal...
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Article
Open AccessOlfactory-cued navigation in shearwaters: linking movement patterns to mechanisms
After foraging in the open ocean pelagic birds can pinpoint their breeding colonies, located on remote islands in visually featureless seascapes. This remarkable ability to navigate over vast distances has bee...
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Article
Open AccessDistinguishing between apparent and actual randomness: a preliminary examination with Australian ants
The correlated random walk paradigm is the dominant conceptual framework for modeling animal movement patterns. Nonetheless, we do not know whether the randomness is apparent or actual. Apparent randomness cou...
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Article
Open AccessThe movement of small insects in the convective boundary layer: linking patterns to processes
In fine warm weather, the daytime convective atmosphere over land areas is full of small migrant insects, among them serious pests (e.g. some species of aphid), but also many beneficial species (e.g. natural e...
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Article
Similarities and differences in path integration and search in two species of desert ants inhabiting a visually rich and a visually barren habitat
Two species of Australian desert ants, one inhabiting a visually rich environment (Melophorus bagoti) and one inhabiting a visually barren environment (as yet unnamed and dubbed Melophorus sp.), were tested on pa...
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Article
Open AccessSignatures of a globally optimal searching strategy in the three-dimensional foraging flights of bumblebees
Simulated annealing is a powerful stochastic search algorithm for locating a global maximum that is hidden among many poorer local maxima in a search space. It is frequently implemented in computers working on...
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Article
Open AccessSignatures of chaos in animal search patterns
One key objective of the emerging discipline of movement ecology is to link animal movement patterns to underlying biological processes, including those operating at the neurobiological level. Nonetheless, lit...
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Article
Detecting Lévy walks without turn designation
Many organisms have been reported to have movement patterns that are well approximated as Lévy walks. This is typically because distributions of straight line distances between consecutive significant turns in...
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Article
Open AccessMussels 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, eme...
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Article
Open AccessMovement patterns of Tenebrio beetles demonstrate empirically that correlated-random-walks have similitude with a Lévy walk
Correlated random walks are the dominant conceptual framework for modelling and interpreting organism movement patterns. Recent years have witnessed a stream of high profile publications reporting that many or...
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Article
Are Lévy flight patterns derived from the Weber–Fechner law in distance estimation?
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are regularly faced with the task of navigating back to their hives from remote food sources. They have evolved several methods to do this, including compass-directed “vector” flights a...
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Article
Lévy flight patterns are predicted to be an emergent property of a bumblebees’ foraging strategy
Bumblebees forage uninterrupted for long periods of time because they are not distracted by sex or territorial defense and have few predators. This has led to a long running debate about whether bumblebees for...
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Article
Modelling of concentrations along a moving observer in an inhomogeneous plume. Biological application: model of odour-mediated insect flights
We develop a stochastic model for the time-evolution of scalar concentrations and temporal gradients in concentration experienced by observers moving within inhomogeneous plumes that are dispersing within turb...
