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Note: >Ironically, their paper arrived only months after a study co-authored by Viswanathan, da Luz and Raposo showed a catastrophic error in Viswanathan’s ori

Note: >Ironically, their paper arrived only months after a study co-authored by Viswanathan, da Luz and Raposo showed a catastrophic error in Viswanathan’s original albatross study. The wet/dry sensors they had relied on weren’t dry only when the birds flew: They were also dry when the albatrosses sat on their nests. Some of the longest “flights” in the data set might have actually been protracted visits to the birds’ nests. The study also criticized certain analytical techniques and claimed that albatrosses don’t do Lévy walks after all, and that it was unclear whether many species did.

vlovich123 6y ago
The answer is immediately in the paragraphs following. > Sims acknowledges that the conflicting papers “put people on edge.” But his work used more up-to-date mathematical methods to demonstrate that a whole menagerie of marine predators take Lévy walks. > These improved methods quashed doubts over whether animals ever do Lévy walks. “The amount of data is overwhelming,” said da Luz. > Sims and Humphries even revisited albatrosses in a subsequent study in 2012. Working with more sophisticated GPS tracking devices, they found that albatrosses did not perform Lévy walks while searching for food above shallow water, where they might have more visual or olfactory information to guide them. But when they flew out over deeper water, the birds did in fact adopt Lévy searches. So the original work had the right conclusion (Albatrosses do adopt Levy searches) for totally flawed reasons (the data didn't actually support the conclusion, the Levy walks weren't being used for the time periods originally predicted).