Chapter 28
Monkey Travels
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a
very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That
makes us something very special.
(Stephen Hawking)
28.1 Model of Monkey Travels
In the rain forests of Peru, a small monkey, a Tamarin, no larger than a squirrel,
lives in groups of about a dozen and spends most of its time in the canopy. It eats,
travels, and sleeps in the canopy, apparently fearing predators on the ground and in
the air above the canopy. The canopy for the most part, is so thick that vision is
limited to a few meters at most. They travel on the average about 90 m before
finding a sufficient quantity of fruit to stop for a feeding bout. They have about 5–10
such bouts each day, before stopping to sleep in the largest local tree. An interesting
question arises as to how these Tamarins find food. One possibility is that they used
their noses. This is the central assumption for the model of this chapter, which is
based on Garber and Hannon [1].
Let us lay out a horizontal plane, which runs through the canopy of all the taller
trees, and is divided into cells of unit width and height. The symbol X measures the
distance from the origin in the center of the space and Y measures the distance
perpendicular to X. The odor strength is measured vertically, perpendicular to the
X–Y plane. The Tamarin troop is considered a point in this X–Y plane and moves in
a straight line for the visual sight distance in the canopy. We assumed that
this distance, called VISIBILITY in our model, is a constant 2.0 m. At the end
of this STEP DISTANCE a new assessment is made and a new direction is chosen.
A save-disabled version of STELLA and the computer models of this book are available at
www.iseesystems.com/modelingdynamicbiologicalsystems.
B. Hannon and M. Ruth, Modeling Dynamic Biological Systems,
Modeling Dynamic Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05615-9_28,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
229
Monkey Travels
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a
very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That
makes us something very special.
(Stephen Hawking)
28.1 Model of Monkey Travels
In the rain forests of Peru, a small monkey, a Tamarin, no larger than a squirrel,
lives in groups of about a dozen and spends most of its time in the canopy. It eats,
travels, and sleeps in the canopy, apparently fearing predators on the ground and in
the air above the canopy. The canopy for the most part, is so thick that vision is
limited to a few meters at most. They travel on the average about 90 m before
finding a sufficient quantity of fruit to stop for a feeding bout. They have about 5–10
such bouts each day, before stopping to sleep in the largest local tree. An interesting
question arises as to how these Tamarins find food. One possibility is that they used
their noses. This is the central assumption for the model of this chapter, which is
based on Garber and Hannon [1].
Let us lay out a horizontal plane, which runs through the canopy of all the taller
trees, and is divided into cells of unit width and height. The symbol X measures the
distance from the origin in the center of the space and Y measures the distance
perpendicular to X. The odor strength is measured vertically, perpendicular to the
X–Y plane. The Tamarin troop is considered a point in this X–Y plane and moves in
a straight line for the visual sight distance in the canopy. We assumed that
this distance, called VISIBILITY in our model, is a constant 2.0 m. At the end
of this STEP DISTANCE a new assessment is made and a new direction is chosen.
A save-disabled version of STELLA and the computer models of this book are available at
www.iseesystems.com/modelingdynamicbiologicalsystems.
B. Hannon and M. Ruth, Modeling Dynamic Biological Systems,
Modeling Dynamic Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05615-9_28,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
229