{"id":220251,"date":"2025-08-16T07:36:51","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T12:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/the-evolutionary-maintenance-of-levy-flight-foraging"},"modified":"2025-08-16T07:36:51","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T12:36:51","slug":"the-evolutionary-maintenance-of-levy-flight-foraging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/the-evolutionary-maintenance-of-levy-flight-foraging","title":{"rendered":"The evolutionary maintenance of L\u00e9vy flight foraging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"padding-right: 20px\"><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-evolutionary-maintenance-of-levy-flight-foraging.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In heterotrophs, incuding animals, survival depends on the net energy gained through foraging. The expectation, then, is that natural selection results in adaptations for efficient foraging that optimize the balance of searching costs and rewards. L\u00e9vy flight foraging has been proposed as an optimal foraging solution. The hypothesis states, if no information about resource locations are available, and the locations are re-visitable, then selection will result in adaptations for L\u00e9vy flight foraging, a type of random walk. It has been argued that Levy-like foraging behaviour may simply reflect how resources are distributed, but empirical and theoretical research suggests that this behaviour is intrinsic or innate. However, this research does not address evolutionary mechanisms, and lacks ecological breadth. We extend the current theoretical framework by including evolutionary ecological contexts. We treat an organism\u2019s random walk as a heritable trait, and explore ecological contexts such as population size, lifespan, carrying capacity, searching costs, reproductive strategies, and different distributions of food. Our evolutionary simulations overwhelmingly resulted in selection for L\u00e9vy-like foraging, regardless of the distribution of food, and evidences L\u00e9vy flight foraging as a bet-hedging strategy. Thus, here we provide some of the first evidence for the evolutionary maintenance of L\u00e9vy flight foraging.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Citation: <\/strong>Campeau W, Simons AM, Stevens B (2022) The evolutionary maintenance of L\u00e9vy flight foraging. PLoS Comput Biol 18: e1009490. <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pcbi\">https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1371\/journal.pcbi<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Editor: <\/strong>Marcos Gomes Eleuterio da Luz, Universidade Federal do Parana, BRAZIL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In heterotrophs, incuding animals, survival depends on the net energy gained through foraging. The expectation, then, is that natural selection results in adaptations for efficient foraging that optimize the balance of searching costs and rewards. L\u00e9vy flight foraging has been proposed as an optimal foraging solution. The hypothesis states, if no information about resource locations [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}