Anomalous diffusion and ergodicity breaking in the movement of wild animals

Anomalous diffusion or, more generally, anomalous transport, with nonlinear dependence of the mean-squared displacement on the measurement time, is ubiquitous in nature. It has been observed in processes ranging from microscopic movement of molecules to macroscopic, large-scale paths of migrating birds. Using data from multiple empirical systems, spanning 12 orders of magnitude in length and 8 orders of magnitude in time, we employ a method to detect the individual underlying origins of anomalous diffusion and transport in the data. We show that such a decomposition of real-life data allows to infer nontrivial behavioral predictions in the fields of single particle tracking in living cells and movement ecology. Focusing on the ecological scale, we apply this decomposition technique to foraging flights of avian predators. We show that within-patch movement is non-ergodic and separated from large-scale inter-patch movement.