Related papers: Predictability and hierarchy in Drosophila behavio…

Most animals possess the ability to actuate a vast diversity of movements, ostensibly constrained only by morphology and physics. In practice, however, a frequent assumption in behavioral science is that most of an animal's activities can…

Animals that travel together in groups display a variety of fascinating motion patterns thought to be the result of delicate local interactions among group members. Although the most informative way of investigating and interpreting…

Here we present the first method for tracking each leg of a fruit fly behaving spontaneously upon a trackball, in real time. Legs were tracked with infrared-fluorescent dye invisible to the fly, and compatible with two-photon microscopy and…

Aging affects almost all aspects of an organism -- its morphology, its physiology, its behavior. Isolating which biological mechanisms are regulating these changes, however, has proven difficult, potentially due to our inability to…

Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…

Handedness in humans - better performance using either the left or right hand - is personally familiar, moderately heritable, and regulated by many genes, including those involved in general body symmetry. But behavioral handedness, i.e.…

Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…

We present a general framework for modeling a wide selection of flocking scenarios under free boundary conditions. Several variants have been considered - including examples for the widely observed behavior of hierarchically interacting…

Animal behavior spans many timescales, from short, seconds-scale actions to circadian rhythms over many hours to life-long changes during aging. Most quantitative behavior studies have focused on short-timescale behaviors such as locomotion…

Although extensive behavioral changes often exist between closely related animal species, our understanding of the genetic basis underlying the evolution of behavior has remained limited. Here, we propose a new framework to study behavioral…

Social foraging is a widespread form of animal foraging in which groups of individuals coordinate their decisions to exploit resources in the environment. Animals show a variety of social structures from egalitarian to hierarchical. In this…

Animal behavior unfolds across many timescales, from fast movement patterns to slow changes in internal states such as hunger, arousal, and circadian phase. These slow variables are rarely measured directly and must instead be inferred from…

Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…

Behavioural phenotyping of Drosophila is an important means in biological and medical research to identify genetic, pathologic or psychologic impact on animal behaviour.

While most processes in biology are highly deterministic, stochastic mechanisms are sometimes used to increase cellular diversity, such as in the specification of sensory receptors. In the human and Drosophila eye, photoreceptors sensitive…

Many natural and engineered complex networks have intricate mesoscopic organization, e.g., the clustering of the constituent nodes into several communities or modules. Often, such modularity is manifested at several different hierarchical…

In complex systems, groups of interacting objects may form prevalent and persistent spatiotemporal patterns, which we refer to as motifs. These motifs can exhibit features that reveal how individual objects interact with one another.…

In this paper we propose the Hatching-Box, a novel imaging and analysis system to automatically monitor and quantify the developmental behavior of Drosophila in standard rearing vials and during regular rearing routines, rendering explicit…

Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…

Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision…