I hope these models serve as inspiration for laboratory/field work focused on animal pursuit. Additionally, I hope to demonstrate some of the power of BBE models and EAs, which have a rich history in artificial life and cognitive science, to biologists and ecologists.

9/9

CTRNNs are amenable to dynamical systems analysis. Three mechanisms generated saltatory movement during pursuit, either the excitation/inhibition of movement by target signal or repeated sampling by tactile foragers. The period of saltatory movement changed according to distance to the target.

8/N

EAs provide synthetic datasets to explore populations of solutions to a given task. In this case, saltatory (stop-and-go) movement frequently mediated pursuit behavior. Saltatory movement is one of the most common movement strategies in search, but less commonly discussed outside search.

7/N

I employed evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to generate a variety of possible solutions in each pursuit task. I allowed the EA to access small neural networks (CTRNNs) in each forager. This approach is often used in models of brain-body-environment (BBE) systems.

6/N

I wanted to know how different perceptual modalities and prey behaviors could shape pursuit behavior. As such, I modeled movement strategies in pursuit of stationary targets, varying both forager perceptual modality (continuous ‘visual’ v. movement-based ‘tactile’) and target reliability (+/-).

5/N

Additionally, almost all prey animals are cryptic in some way. Many exhibit behavioral crypsis, which may limit a forager’s ability to pursue that prey animal. This is true of mobile and sessile prey animals alike, the latter especially well represented by embryonic behavior in eggs.

4/N

In many cases, an encounter with a target does not imply its capture (‘soft’ encounters). Soft encounters are often represented by parameters that denote capture success. However, capture success depends on movement strategies contingent on perceptual apparatus, physiology, and environment.

3/N

A majority of animal movement models focus on search and encounters, or how animals move through an environment to find what they are looking for. Movement strategies post-encounter (e.g., during pursuit of an encountered target) are less well understood.

2/N

Thanks to my co-authors Randall Beer and Peter Todd. Link to the published version to come!