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The Behavioral Mandala : a new step towards the understanding of the behavioural complexity behind invertebrates and vertebrates foraging strategies
Movement is a fundamental characteristic of life. It determines the fate of individuals through its influence on reproduction, feeding and survival, and ultimately populations, communities, and ecosystems. An important open question lies in the quantification of both the geometric and stochastic components of movement, their representation in the absence of extrinsic stimulus and their response to abiotic and biotic stressors. By analogy with the fundamental and realized niches of ecology sensu Hutchinson (1957), we introduce the fundamental and realized behavioral niches using the Behavioral Mandala. The Mandala is based on an explicit representation of the geometric and stochastic component of movement observed in the absence of extrinsic stimulus and in response to a range of representative stressors. Based on the behavior of organisms ranging from protists to humans, we show that the Behavioral Mandala provides a unifying approach to the problems of quantifying complexity in animal movement, through the identification of innate complexity and the quantification of changes in complexity due to external stimuli, thus allowing to compare the relative strengths of response behaviours across taxa and types of stimuli. Specifically, we show that the geometric and stochastic components of behavioral complexity are described in terms of fractals in both the absence and presence of extrinsic drivers. These results indicate that the Behavioral Mandala can be used to quantify objectively the behavioral complexity of virtually any moving animal, and fractal properties may be an inherent and adaptive aspect of the movement of animals, irrespective of their size, sex or taxon.