Meeting Abstract
In the upper intertidal zone, limpets face complex and so far undescribed foraging landscapes. The Lévy walk foraging hypothesis states that when food resources are sparse and randomly distributed, a power law model with an exponent of two describes the most efficient foraging behavior. In this study, we employed a novel field set-up and maximum likelihood statistics to characterize and compare the foraging behavior of two limpet species, Lottia scabra and L. austrodigitalis, in the intertidal zone adjacent to Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. To do this, we performed multiple deployments of four waterproof, infrared cameras, which photographed limpets once a minute for two weeks across four different field sites. We developed limpet tracking code in MATLAB, and used the tracks to compute a variety of parameters, including step length and turn angle distributions. These data allowed us to characterize limpet foraging behavior during previously unobserved time periods, and to fit statistical models to limpet step length distributions. Results suggest that limpet foraging is suboptimal for an environment with sparse resources, that L. scabra and L. austrodigitalis have statistically indistinguishable foraging patterns, and that both species exhibit strong individual variation in foraging behavior. Correlations between foraging behavior and environmental factors, including food distributions and rock topography, were investigated to determine whether the observed individual variation might be a signature of behavioral plasticity or animal personality.
