Math stories

Foraging flights

albatrossFirst, he tracked basking sharks—filterfeeding leviathans that look like supersized great whites—in the coastal waters near Great Britain, and then Atlantic cod, leatherback turtles, Magellanic penguins, and bigeye tuna. He’s wrangled and tagged ocean sunfish, blue sharks, and shortfin mako sharks (and claims success by the fact that he still has all his fingers).

Only after David Sims had exhausted many other species did he find his ultimate prey: the albatross. Sims, a senior research fellow at the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, Plymouth, and a marine ecology professor at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, has tracked many a species during his career, and it’s all to answer a fundamental ecology question: What’s the best way for an animal to search for small and irregularly distributed pockets of food when it has limited information, and the whole ocean is open to it?

Read more at PNAS.