The Physics of Foraging

Gandhimohan M. Viswanathan is Professor of Physics at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Previously, he was Associate Professor at the Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal de Alagoas, where he spent over a decade investigating the complex phenomenology seen in physical, biological and economic systems. Marcos G. E. da Luz is an Associate Professor in the Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Paraná. He works with both numerical and analytical methods in disorder, complexity and non-linearity in classical and quantum systems and with theoretical models in ecology. Ernesto P. Raposo is an Associate Professor in the Laboratório de Física Teórica e Computacional, Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. His current research interests include statistical physics of random searches and the foraging problem, disordered antiferromagnets, and quantum field theory of quasi-unidimensional magnetic polymer chains. H. Eugene Stanley is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University, Professor of Physics, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering, and Professor of Physiology at Boston University School of Medicine. A pioneer in interdisciplinary science, he has won the Boltzmann Medal and numerous other awards for his contributions.

• Part I. Introduction: Movement: 1. Empirical motivation for studying movement; 2. Statistical physics of biological motion; 3. Random walks and Lévy flights; 4. Wandering albatrosses; Part II. Experimental Findings: 5. Early studies; 6. Evidence of anomalous diffusion; 7. Human dispersal; 8. How strong is the evidence?; Part III. Theory of Foraging: 9. Optimizing encounter rates; 10. Lévy flight foraging; 11. Other search models; Part IV. Finale: A Broader Context: 12. Superdiffusive random searches; 13. Adaptational versus emergent superdiffusion; 14. Perspectives and open problems; Appendices; References; Index.

'A work rich with examples of the ways in which animals move through their environment in quest of food and prey, with mathematical descriptions of such behavior, including Lévy walks, where the step-length distributions have power-law tails and searches can be optimum. This book expanded my horizons.' Howard Berg, Herchel Smith Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, and author of Random Walks in Biology