Evidence for biological Lévy flights stands

2008/02/13 by Denis Boyer, Octavio Miramontes, Boyer, Denis +4 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Diffusion and Search Dynamics #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Monoclonal and Polyclonal Antibodies Research #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0802.1762

6 page, 1 figure

arxiv created 2008/02/13 · openalex publication_date 2008/02/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Edwards et al. [Nature 449, 1044-1048 (2007)] revisited well-known studies reporting power-laws in the frequency distribution of flight duration of wandering albatrosses, and concluded that no Lévy process could model recent observations with higher resolution. Here we show that this re-analysis suffers from a conceptual misunderstanding, and that the new albatross data remain consistent with a biological Lévy flight.

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