Regensburg 2010 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 5: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session of BP + DY)

DY 5.4: Vortrag

Montag, 22. März 2010, 15:00–15:15, H45

Velocity distributions of foraging bumblebees in the presence of predators — •Friedrich Lenz¹, Thomas C. Ings², Lars Chittka², Aleksei V. Chechkin³, Holger Kantz⁴, and Rainer Klages¹ — ¹Queen Mary University of London, School of Math. Sci., UK — ²Queen Mary University of London, School of Biol. & Chem. Sci., UK — ³Inst. for Theo. Physics, NSC KIPT, Kharkov, Ukraine — ⁴Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden

We analyse changes in the flight behaviour of foraging bumblebees under varying environmental conditions, measured in a laboratory experiment by Ings and Chittka[1]. We estimate parameters for different plausible velocity distributions by maximising their likelihood and compare their goodness of fit by applying the Akaike Information Criterion. Using Quantile-Quantile-plots we check for deviations between the estimated probability distributions and the data. We also discuss differences in these distributions for different individual bumblebees. On this basis, we look for systematic changes of the distributions due to the presence of different kinds of artificial spiders.

[1] Thomas C. Ings and Lars Chittka. Current Biology, 18(19):1520-15 24 (2008)