Movement patterns of Tenebrio beetles demonstrate empirically that correlated-random-walks have similitude with a Lévy walk.

AbstractCorrelated random walks are the dominant conceptual framework for modelling and interpreting organism movement patterns. Recent years have witnessed a stream of high profile publications reporting that many organisms perform Lévy walks; movement patterns that seemingly stand apart from the correlated random walk paradigm because they are discrete and scale-free rather than continuous and scale-finite. Our new study of the movement patterns of Tenebriomolitor beetles in unchanging, featureless arenas provides the first empirical support for a remarkable and deep theoretical synthesis that unites correlated random walks and Lévy walks. It demonstrates that the two models are complemen…