Multiple power laws and scaling relation in exploratory locomotion of the snail Tegula nigerrima

Abstract

One of goals in soft robotics is to achive spontaneous behavior like real organisms. To gain a clue to achieve this, we examined the long (16-hour) spontaneous exploratory locomotion of snails. The active forager snail, Tegula nigerrima, from an intertidal rocky shore was selected to test the general hypothesis that nervous systems are inherently near a critical state, which is self-organized to drive spontaneous animal behavior. This hypothesis, known as the critical brain hypothesis, was originally proposed for vertebrate species, but it might be applicable to other invertebrate species as well. We first investigated the power spectra of the speed of locomotion of the snails ($N=39$). The spectra showed $1/{f^\alpha}$ fluctuation, which is one of the signatures of self-organized criticality. The $\alpha$ was estimated to be about 0.9. We further examined whether the spatial and temporal quantities show multiple power-laws and scaling relations, which are rigorous criteria of criticality. Although the satisfaction of these criteria is limited to a truncated region and provides limited evidence to demonstrate the aspect of self-organization, the multiple power-laws and the scaling relations were overall satisfied. Therefore, these results additionally support the generality of the critical brain hypothesis.