Modeling the searching behavior of social monkeys

We discuss various features of the trajectories of spider monkeys looking for food in a tropical forest, as observed recently in an extensive in situ study. Some of the features observed can be interpreted as the result of social interactions. In addition, a simple model of deterministic walk in a random environment reproduces the observed angular correlations between successive steps, and in some cases, the emergence of Lévy distributions for the length of the steps.