User:Viswan2/Lévy flight foraging hypothesis

The movement of animals closely resembles in many ways the random walks of dust particles in a fluid . This similarity led to interest in trying to understand how animals move via the analogy to Brownian motion.

Until the early 1990s, the conventional wisdom held that most animals diffuse like particles undergoing Brownian motion. However, starting in the late 1980s, evidence began to accumulate that did not fit the theoretical predictions.

In 1999, a theoretical investigation of the properties of Lévy flights showed that an inverse square distribution of flight times or distances could optimize the search efficiency under certain circumstances. Specifically, a Lévy walk based search, consisting of a constant velocity search following a Lévy flight path, is optimal for searching sparsely and randomly distributed revisitable targets.

The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis grew out of this observation. It can be stated as follows: since Lévy flights and walks can optimize search efficiencies, therefore natural selection should have led to adaptations for Lévy flight foraging.