title: Mussels realize Weierstrassian Lévy walks as composite correlated random walks.
abstract: Composite correlated random walks (CCRW) have been posited as a potential replacement for Lévy walks and it has also been suggested that CCRWs have been mistaken for Lévy walks. Here I test an alternative, emerging hypothesis: namely that some organisms approximate Lévy walks as an innate CCRW. It is shown that the tri-modal CCRW found to describe accurately the movement patterns of mussels (Mytilus edulis) during spatial pattern formation in mussel beds can be regarded as being the first three levels in a hierarchy of nested movement patterns which if extended indefinitely would correspond to a Lévy walk whose characteristic (power-law) exponent is tuned to nearly minimize the time required to form patterned beds. The mussels realise this Lévy walk to good approximation across a biologically meaningful range of scales. This demonstrates that the CCRW not only describes mussel movement patterns, it explains them.
authors.affiliation: Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 2JQ, UK.
authors.forename: Andy M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Reynolds
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008954:Models, Biological; D049880:Mytilus edulis / Q000502:physiology*; D016138:Walking / Q000502:physiology*