Sharks move strangely to find food

Sharks and other marine animals search for food with a kind of shopping-like type of people, according to one of the biggest analyzes of the habit of searching for prey - and also the first analysis of Undersea predators.

The results of an international study show that the habits of animals seem to evolve into a common ' rule ' to search for scattered distribution in the vast ocean. The rule consists of a random movement pattern called Concentrated Movement, predators using a series of small movements and scattered long jumps to new food sources. This increases the chance of finding food, however much thinner.

Dr David Sims of the Plymouth University and Marine Biology Association, who led the study, said: 'Finding a systematic way to stop is the most effective way if you want to search for scattered objects. . If you go to the supermarket to buy eggs, you find them in a certain location and if you don't find them, you will choose another place to look for them. You probably won't start from one end of the supermarket and find all the stalls. Predators store a lot of energy from using concentrated movement, so they can move farther to find food. '

Mark for a sun-burning shark (Photo: Natural Environment Research Council)

Researchers have analyzed data from sophisticated electronic tags attached to a wide variety of marine predators, such as sharks, tuna, cod, sea turtles and penguins, at Many different locations around the globe. They compared this data with the prey pattern of distribution and found similarity, suggesting that predators have drawn their own search rules to get the best results from food search journeys. .

Dr. Sims said: 'We have developed a type of computer from the results found, and this confirms that the model proves to be optimal for a wide range of natural food. The search rule seems to be a complex and volatile general solution '.

This migration habit also occurs in other animals, including human movement, suggesting patterns discovered by the research team that may be universal for all species. If so, they would be useful in programming robots more successfully when collecting samples from unfriendly places like volcanoes, seabeds or other planets. Understanding this pattern also gives more insights into the time people discovered and occupied the continents.

The study involved international behavioral ecologists, mathematicians and engineers from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia and New Zealand. Officially funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, Defra, the Royal Society and the Fisheries Association of the British islands.

The magazine referred to the " Marine predator habit of eating habits " published in Nature on February 28, 2008.