Papers › Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior
Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior
Antonio Carlos Costa, Gautam Sridhar, Claire Wyart, Massimo Vergassola
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Animal behavior is shaped by a myriad of mechanisms acting on a wide range of scales, which hampers quantitative reasoning and the identification of general principles. Here, we combine data analysis and theory to investigate the relationship between behavioral plasticity and heavy-tailed statistics often observed in animal behavior. Specifically, we first leverage high-resolution recordings of C. elegans locomotion to show that stochastic transitions among long-lived behaviors exhibit heavy-tailed first passage time distributions and correlation functions. Such heavy tails can be explained by slow adaptation of behavior over time. This particular result motivates our second step of introducing a general model where we separate fast dynamics on a quasi-stationary multi-well potential, from non-ergodic, slowly varying modes. We then show that heavy tails generically emerge in such a model, and we provide a theoretical derivation of the resulting functional form, which can become a power law with exponents that depend on the strength of the fluctuations. Finally, we provide direct support for the generality of our findings by testing them in a C. elegans mutant where adaptation is suppressed and heavy tails thus disappear, and recordings of larval zebrafish swimming behavior where heavy tails are again prevalent.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections