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A follow-on article on this subject

Posted by OctavioMira on 26 Apr 2012 at 15:46 GMT

In a recent study published in the prestigious open access journal PLoS ONE, a team of scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City (IF-C3) and the Blanes Center for Advanced Studies in Spain have revisited the current Wandering Albatross flying data and have concluded that the movement patterns of these seabirds are the result of the interactions of the animal with its prey field. By studying computer models where prey is fractally distributed in the ocean (a well known fact familiar to marine ecologists), the authors of this novel study conclude that model seabirds flying over large-scale heterogeneous environments reproduce the observed detection (or capture) times between prey without ruling out the fact that Albatross may actually be performing Levy flights during search. These new findings are also useful for disentangling the current debate on how organism-environment interactions build up statistical patterns of movement, not only in seabirds but in other animals, humans and cyber-machines as well.

Octavio Miramontes, Denis Boyer & Frederic Bartumeus. The Effects of Spatially Heterogeneous Prey Distributions on Detection Patterns in Foraging Seabirds. PLoS ONE 7(4): e34317. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034317

No competing interests declared.