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The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging

Lévy flight is a type of random walk that characterizes the behaviour of many natural phenomena studied across a multiplicity of academic disciplines; within biology specifically, the behaviour of fish, birds, insects, mollusks, bacteria, plants, slime molds, t-cells, and human populations. The Lévy...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Campeau, Winston, Simons, Andrew M., Stevens, Brett
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8797186/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35041659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009490
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author Campeau, Winston
Simons, Andrew M.
Stevens, Brett
author_facet Campeau, Winston
Simons, Andrew M.
Stevens, Brett
author_sort Campeau, Winston
collection PubMed
description Lévy flight is a type of random walk that characterizes the behaviour of many natural phenomena studied across a multiplicity of academic disciplines; within biology specifically, the behaviour of fish, birds, insects, mollusks, bacteria, plants, slime molds, t-cells, and human populations. The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis states that because Lévy flights can maximize an organism’s search efficiency, natural selection should result in Lévy-like behaviour. Empirical and theoretical research has provided ample evidence of Lévy walks in both extinct and extant species, and its efficiency across models with a diversity of resource distributions. However, no model has addressed the maintenance of Lévy flight foraging through evolutionary processes, and existing models lack ecological breadth. We use numerical simulations, including lineage-based models of evolution with a distribution of move lengths as a variable and heritable trait, to test the Lévy flight foraging hypothesis. We include biological and ecological contexts such as population size, searching costs, lifespan, resource distribution, speed, and consider both energy accumulated at the end of a lifespan and averaged over a lifespan. We demonstrate that selection often results in Lévy-like behaviour, although conditional; smaller populations, longer searches, and low searching costs increase the fitness of Lévy-like behaviour relative to Brownian behaviour. Interestingly, our results also evidence a bet-hedging strategy; Lévy-like behaviour reduces fitness variance, thus maximizing geometric mean fitness over multiple generations.
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spelling pubmed-87971862022-01-29 The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging Campeau, Winston Simons, Andrew M. Stevens, Brett PLoS Comput Biol Research Article Lévy flight is a type of random walk that characterizes the behaviour of many natural phenomena studied across a multiplicity of academic disciplines; within biology specifically, the behaviour of fish, birds, insects, mollusks, bacteria, plants, slime molds, t-cells, and human populations. The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis states that because Lévy flights can maximize an organism’s search efficiency, natural selection should result in Lévy-like behaviour. Empirical and theoretical research has provided ample evidence of Lévy walks in both extinct and extant species, and its efficiency across models with a diversity of resource distributions. However, no model has addressed the maintenance of Lévy flight foraging through evolutionary processes, and existing models lack ecological breadth. We use numerical simulations, including lineage-based models of evolution with a distribution of move lengths as a variable and heritable trait, to test the Lévy flight foraging hypothesis. We include biological and ecological contexts such as population size, searching costs, lifespan, resource distribution, speed, and consider both energy accumulated at the end of a lifespan and averaged over a lifespan. We demonstrate that selection often results in Lévy-like behaviour, although conditional; smaller populations, longer searches, and low searching costs increase the fitness of Lévy-like behaviour relative to Brownian behaviour. Interestingly, our results also evidence a bet-hedging strategy; Lévy-like behaviour reduces fitness variance, thus maximizing geometric mean fitness over multiple generations. Public Library of Science 2022-01-18 /pmc/articles/PMC8797186/ /pubmed/35041659 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009490 Text en © 2022 Campeau et al https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Campeau, Winston
Simons, Andrew M.
Stevens, Brett
The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title_full The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title_fullStr The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title_full_unstemmed The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title_short The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging
title_sort evolutionary maintenance of lévy flight foraging
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8797186/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35041659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009490
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