NEW MODELS OF ANIMAL MOVEMENT By ANDREW M. HEIN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy NEW MODELS OF ANIMAL MOVEMENT By Andrew M. Hein August 2013 Chair: James F. Gillooly Cochair: Scott A. McKinley Major: Zoology Movement is an iconic feature of life; microorganisms swim up chemical gradients, motile predators search their environments for prey, and migratory animals make journeys that can take them across the planet. Advances in biomechanics and sensory biology have created opportunities to develop new mathematical models of animal movement that incorporate organismal biomechanics and sensory physiology. Such models are useful for understanding the ecological and evolutionary drivers of animal movement behavior, and also for predicting basic ecological rates and scales–for example, the rate of interactions among moving predators and their prey, or the spatial scale of movements made by seasonal migrants. This Dissertation is an attempt to develop such general models, and to use them to learn about both the origins and the implications of animal movement behavior. In Chapter 2, I began by investigating the physical constraints related to one of the most well studied movements that animals make: migration. I used a mathematical model to show how body mass influences the maximum distances that migrants travel through its effect on locomotion. I confirmed model predictions using a new global-scale dataset of animal migration distances. In Chapter 3, I sought to better understand how to model animal search behavior in the presence of noisy sensory signals, and how sensory information might affect the movement behavior of a searching animal. I developed a new mathematical framework for modeling the use of sensory data in movement decision-making. Results showed