The evolutionary maintenance of Lévy flight foraging.
PLoS Comput Biol
; 18(1): e1009490, 2022 01.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-35041659
ABSTRACT
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.
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Comportamento Apetitivo
/
Modelos Estatísticos
/
Evolução Molecular
/
Aptidão Genética
/
Modelos Biológicos
Tipo de estudo:
Prognostic_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limite:
Animals
Idioma:
En
Revista:
PLoS Comput Biol
Assunto da revista:
BIOLOGIA
/
INFORMATICA MEDICA
Ano de publicação:
2022
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Canadá