On the origin of bursts and heavy tails in animal dynamics

A.M. Reynolds

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 2, 245-249

Abstract: Over recent years there has been an accumulation of evidence that many animal behaviours are characterised by common scale-invariant patterns of switching between two contrasting activities over a period of time. This is evidenced in mammalian wake–sleep patterns, in the intermittent stop–start locomotion of Drosophila fruit flies, and in the Lévy walk movement patterns of a diverse range of animals in which straight-line movements are punctuated by occasional turns. Here it is shown that these dynamics can be modelled by a stochastic variant of Barabási’s model [A.-L. Barabási, The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics, Nature 435 (2005) 207–211] for bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. The new model captures a tension between two competing and conflicting activities. The durations of one type of activity are distributed according to an inverse-square power-law, mirroring the ubiquity of inverse-square power-law scaling seen in empirical data. The durations of the second type of activity follow exponential distributions with characteristic timescales that depend on species and metabolic rates. This again is a common feature of animal behaviour. Bursty human dynamics, on the other hand, are characterised by power-law distributions with scaling exponents close to −1 and −3/2.

Keywords: Animal dynamics; Heavy tails; Stochasticity; Lévy walks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:2:p:245-249

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2010.09.020

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