Tidal drift removes the need for area-restricted search in foraging Atlantic puffins

• Published in: Biology Letters
• Main Authors: Bennison, Ashley, Quinn, John L., Debney, Alison, Jessopp, Mark
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: The Royal Society 2019
• Subjects: Marine Biology; Levy; Atlantic puffin; fratercula; Fratercula arctica
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6684983/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31288687; https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0208

Understanding how animals forage is a central objective in ecology. Theory suggests that where food is uniformly distributed, Brownian movement ensures the maximum prey encounter rate, but when prey is patchy, the optimal strategy resembles a Lévy walk where area-restricted search (ARS) is intersper...