Sharks Act Like Math Geniuses ~ Hot Gossip Town

A great white shark.

Terry Goss, Wikimedia Commons

Sharks behave as though they are brilliant mathematicians, finds new research, although they may be more sensible than clever.
The mathematician-like behavior attributed to sharks and certain other marine predators, animals and organisms is known as Lévy flight. It is a seemingly complex form of random walk comprising clusters of short step lengths with longer movements between them.
"Lévy flights, named after the French mathematician Paul Lévy, arose in a purely mathematical context in the first half of the last century," Andy Reynolds of Rothamsted Research told Discovery News. "Sharks and other marine predators use Lévy flight to locate their prey. "

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He explained that the technique's movements "can be advantageous when searching for randomly distributed resources because they reduce 'over sampling' without the need for cognitive maps and sophisticated navigational abilities."
For the study, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Reynolds began by asking a simple question, namely how do sharks perform Lévy flights? As he said, "They are not mathematicians. "
He examined the possibility that sharks use cues from their environment, such as the turbulent waters that surround them.
"This seemed reasonable," he said, "because turbulent flows are very complex -- the whirls within whirls within whirls like the ones Leonardo da Vinci drew -- and within which could be lurking the necessary clues."

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Using the mathematics of what is known as "turbulent theory," he showed that the programming for Lévy flight movements arises naturally if the predators change their direction of travel only after encountering patches of relatively strong turbulence.
Reynolds next ran computer simulations of shark movements in turbulent flows. The theoretical predictions and simulation data fitted together perfectly.
"There is no need for sharks to have evolved sophisticated neurological and physiological processes for the execution of the Lévy flights, which are the lead to optimal foraging, " he said. "Lévy flights will come for free if they just turn away from patches of strong turbulence."

A great white shark hunting a seal in False Bay off the coast of South Africa.

Keren Su/Corbis

The complex, optimal behavior is therefore somewhat of a fortuitous fluke that Reynolds said could be a by-product of a natural aversion to being pushed around.
What's remarkable is that sharks then benefit on a daily basis without exerting much brainpower. Conversely, humans tend to consciously and with great effort think their way out of problems.
If time on Earth is any measure of success, sharks definitely have us beat. Great white sharks, for example, have been around for more than 10 million years. In contrast, Homo sapiens has only been around for perhaps 1/100th as long.

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No one has ever been able to measure a shark's IQ, but researchers indicate that sharks will not win any prizes for smarts.
In their book "Great White Sharks: The Biology of Carcharodon carcharias," authors Peter Klimley and David Ainley report that an adult white shark "has a moderately sized, fairly generalized brain."
They conclude that the "greatest brain development " among sharks has taken place in the threshers. Thresher sharks like the pelagic thresher, bigeye, and common thresher might be the brainiacs of the shark world.
In the meantime, great whites, which are recovering in numbers off the Atlantic and Pacific U.S. coasts, and many other sharks continue to live by a simple form of common sense.
"It is sensible to avoid being pushed around by turbulence, " Reynolds said. "Being pushed around causes damage and disorientation. Better to simply turn away when the going is tough."
"Perhaps that is a nice way sum things up: when the going gets tough, the tough get going."

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