ON QUANTIFYING INSECT MOVEMENTS

We elaborate on methods described by Turchin, Odendaal & Rausher for q uantifying insect movement pathways. We note the need to scale measure ment resolution to the study insects and the questions being asked, an d we discuss the use of surveying instrumentation for recording sequen tial positions of individuals on pathways. We itemize several measures that may be used to characterize movement pathways and illustrate the se by comparisons among several Eleodes beetles occurring in shortgras s steppe. The fractal dimension of pathways may provide insights not a vailable from absolute measures of pathway configuration. Finally, we describe a renormalization procedure that may be used to remove sequen tial interdependence among locations of moving individuals while prese rving the basic attributes of the pathway.