Overturning conclusions of Lévy flight movement patterns by fishing boats and foraging animals

A surprisingly diverse variety of foragers have previously been concluded to exhibit movement patterns known as Lévy flights, a special type of random walk. These foragers range in size from microzooplankton in experiments to fishermen in the Pacific Ocean and the North Sea. The Lévy flight conclusion implies that all the foragers have similar scale-free movement patterns that can be described by a single dimensionless parameter, the exponent micro of a power-law (Pareto) distribution. However, the previous conclusions have been made using methods that have since been shown to be problematic: inaccurate techniques were used to estimate micro, and the power-law distribution was usually assumed to hold without testing any alternative hypotheses. Therefore, I address the open question of whether the previous data still support the Lévy flight hypothesis, and thus determine whether Lévy flights really are so ubiquitous in ecology. I present a comprehensive reanalysis of 17 data sets from seven previous studies for which Lévy flight behavior had been concluded, covering marine, terrestrial, and experimental systems from four continents. I use the modern likelihood and Akaike weights approach to test whether simple alternative models are more supported by the data than Lévy flights. The previously estimated values of the power-law exponent micro do not match those calculated here using the accurate likelihood approach, and almost all of them lie outside of the likelihood-based 95% confidence intervals. Furthermore, the original power-law Lévy flight model is overwhelmingly rejected for 16 out of the 17 data sets when tested against three other simple models. For one data set, the data are consistent with coming from a bounded power-law distribution (a truncated Lévy flight). For three other data sets, an exponential distribution corresponding to a simple Poisson process is suitable. Thus, Lévy flight movement patterns are not the common phenomena that was once thought, and are not suitable for use as ecosystem indicators for fisheries management, as has been proposed.

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