Lévy flights and self-similar exploratory behaviour of termite workers

It has been established recently that a variety of animals move and explore their surroundings in an optimal way following L\`evy-like patterns in the statistics of the distances traveled. Here we analyze exploratory spatial behaviour in isolated termite workers kept in large containers, free from the constrained movements they experience within tunnels. In this way we were able to assess individual free exploratory behaviour in clueless environments and away from social interactions. We show by analyzing over half a million movement displacements that isolated termite workers actually exhibit a range of very interesting dynamical properties --including L\`evy flights-- in their exploratory behaviour. Our study analyses anomalous diffusion and structure functions to estimate values of the scaling exponents describing displacement statistics.

We evince the fractal nature of the movement patterns and show how the scaling exponents describing termite space exploration intriguingly comply with mathematical relations found in the physics of transport phenomena. By doing this, we rescue a rich variety of physical and biological phenomenology that can be potentially important and meaningful for the study of complex animal behavior and, in particular, for the study of how patterns of exploratory behaviour of individual social insects may impact not only their feeding demands but also nestmate encounter patterns and, hence, their dynamics at the social scale. \\

\textbf{Reference}\\
Miramontes O, DeSouza O, Paiva LR, Marins A, Orozco S (2014). L\`evy Flights and Self-Similar Exploratory Behaviour of Termite Workers: Beyond Model Fitting. PLoS ONE 9(10): e111183.% doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111183.
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\textbf{Acknowledgements}\\
We thank the Brazilian Ci?ncia Sem Fronteiras program (CSF-CAPES) 0148/2012 and Fapemig for funding.