title: Lévy flights and self-similar exploratory behaviour of termite workers: beyond model fitting.
abstract: Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for movement patterns described by power-laws. Here we show by analyzing over half a million movement displacements that isolated termite workers actually exhibit a range of very interesting dynamical properties--including Lévy flights--in their exploratory behaviour. Going beyond the current trend of statistical model fitting alone, our study analyses anomalous diffusion and structure functions to estimate values of the scaling exponents describing displacement statistics. We evince the fractal nature of the movement patterns and show how the scaling exponents describing termite space exploration intriguingly comply with mathematical relations found in the physics of transport phenomena. By doing this, we rescue a rich variety of physical and biological phenomenology that can be potentially important and meaningful for the study of complex animal behavior and, in particular, for the study of how patterns of exploratory behaviour of individual social insects may impact not only their feeding demands but also nestmate encounter patterns and, hence, their dynamics at the social scale.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Sistemas Complejos, Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico; C3, Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico.
authors.forename: Octavio
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Miramontes
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Termitologia, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Og
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: DeSouza
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Termitologia, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Leticia Ribeiro
authors.initials: LR
authors.lastname: Paiva
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Termitologia, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Marins
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Sistemas Complejos, Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico.
authors.forename: Sirio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Orozco
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D020049:Isoptera / Q000502:physiology*; D008124:Locomotion; D008954:Models, Biological