Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme
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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: Talk
Monday, March 22, 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)