There is currently a controversial discussion in the biophysical
literature about the hypothesis that animal migration can be understood
in terms of Levy flights, which define a specific class of stochastic
processes in the mathematics literature. This statistics can in turn be
shown to represent an optimal search strategy if certain conditions on
the target distributions are fulfilled. In my talk I will briefly
review important literature highlighting this problem. The presentation
should set the scene for the subsequent two talks, which will elaborate
on fundamental aspects related to these questions.