Post-contact immobility and half-lives that save lives.

ABSTRACT: A wide variety of animals become completely immobile after initial contact with a potential predator. This behaviour is considered to be a last-ditch escape strategy. Here, we test the hypothesis that such immobility should have an extremely unpredictable duration. We find that it spans more than three orders of magnitude in antlion larvae. We also analyse the second period of immobility that follows the first bout of immobility, and consider the distributions of both first and second immobility periods within the context of the intermittence that characterizes the movement of most organisms. Both immobility durations were fitted best by exponential distributions. Therefore, both were characterized by high variability and hence, unpredictability. The immobility half-life, its mean duration

SUBMITTER: Sendova-Franks AB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7423462 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature