期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2011
卷号：108
期号：21
页码：8704-8707
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1015208108
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Many animal paths have an intricate statistical pattern that manifests itself as a power law-like tail in the distribution of movement lengths. Such distributions occur if individuals move according to a Levy flight (a mode of dispersal in which the distance moved follows a power law), or if there is variation between individuals such that some individuals move much farther than others. Distinguishing between these two mechanisms requires large quantities of data, which are not available for most species studied. Here, we analyze paths of black bean aphids (Aphis fabae Scopoli) and show that individual animals move in a predominantly diffusive manner, but that, because of variation at population level, they collectively appear to display superdiffusive characteristics, often interpreted as being characteristic for a Levy flight.
关键词：animal movement ; diffusion ; random walk ; statistical inference ; movement ecology
