Ecology ePosters

Nascent animals are most in need of learning to identify predators due to their vulnerability, yet paradoxically, are generally assumed not to be capable of such rapid, complex learning tasks. Here, a robotic fish-attacker interaction assay showed that larval zebrafish just a week of age learn to identify and avoid a…

Foraging, the set of behaviors associated with seeking valuable resources (e.g., food, water) while avoiding danger (e.g., predators), is ubiquitous among organisms, but its neural circuit basis is presently unclear. Most existing work on navigation, a key component of foraging, involves animals in small, fully…

Social foraging is a fundamental collective behavior observed across various species, but studying complex multi-agent dynamics and accompanying neural activity in natural settings remains challenging. Here we present an in silico study of social interaction during foraging using recurrent neural network (RNN) agents…

Predatory behavior is crucial for survival and fitness in many species, evolving through complex interactions of genetics, adaptation, and learning. This interplay of innate and acquired neural mechanisms makes predation a rich subject for neuroscientific and neuroethological investigation. Current approaches to…

Many species cohesively navigate their environment as a group. This includes fish schools and shoals, where group structure emerges from social interactions, which can subsequently facilitate adaptive advantages such as collective foraging. While previous work has characterized how group structure emerges from social…

Nightingales are renowned for their large song repertoire, including the acoustically distinct type of so-called whistle songs. These contain temporal sequences of unmodulated tonal syllables, known as whistle syllables, defining the fundamental frequency of the song, i.e., the pitch. While recent research has shown…

The role of dysregulated gut microbiota (GM) is widely recognized as relevant to the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease (PD), particularly in case of non-motor symptoms such as depression and anhedonia. Most transgenic mouse models of PD, however, don’t exhibit clinically relevant dysbiosis. Here, for the first time,…

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. Its strongest genetic risk factor is the e4 allele of the apolipoprotein E (APOE), and risk scales with APOE-e4 load (e4/e4 > e4/e3 > e3/e3). APOE-e4 has been linked to distinct gut microbiome composition in murine models, but genotype effects on the human…

Normative principles describe how to efficiently encode visual scenes, and supervised learning models show how formal tasks shape visual processing, yet animal vision ultimately adapts to encode survival-relevant features. To study how ecology constrains visual processing, we present a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Space can be a limited resource. Many species including humans, evolved a compromise regulating space sharing and its occupancy based on social determinants. For example, students in a classroom tend to sit close to their friends, keeping the same spots across days, revealing the social structure in the classroom.…

To successfully forage for food, animals much balance the energetic cost of searching for and traveling between food sources with the energetic benefit of exploiting those sources. The Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) provides one normative account of this balance by specifying that a forager should leave a food patch…