According to a recent news item entitled: "A new study raises doubts
about fractal patterns in animal behavior", in the ScienceNews e-
letter (week of Dec. 15, 2007) a study by Edwards et al. (2007),
published in Nature of Oct. 25, 2007, casts serious doubts on the
validity of the various claims that have begun to proliferate in the
scientific literature, (starting with albatross birds, in 1996),
search for food by performing Levy flights, or rather Levy searches,
(since the claims by now encompass various walking mammals, in
addition to flying birds and insects, as well as swimming plankton).
According to Edwards et al. the claims are based on the use of
improper methodology and erroneous statistics.

Levy patterns (named after the French mathematician Paul Levy) are
stochastic (chaotic) patterns, resembling Brownian motion, (e.g. the
random motion of a speck of dust in air), but contrary to the
completely...