Topic: Ethology

Started at 09 .15 - A WHOLE DAY symposium celebrating the work of Mike Land

Note: British 16.15 is the finishing time

Under the sea: Challenges and Solutions in Aquatic Foraging

SimBA for Behavioral Neuroscientists

Several excellent computational frameworks exist that enable high-throughput and consistent tracking of freely moving unmarked animals. SimBA introduce and distribute a plug-and play pipeline that enables users to use these pose-estimation approaches in combination with behavioral annotation for the generation of supervised machine-learning behavioral predictive classifiers. SimBA was developed for the analysis of complex social behaviors, but includes the flexibility for users to generate predictive classifiers across other behavioral modalities with minimal effort and no specialized computational background. SimBA has a variety of extended functions for large scale batch video pre-processing, generating descriptive statistics from movement features, and interactive modules for user-defined regions of interest and visualizing classification probabilities and movement patterns.

Neuroscience in the mud: interplay between lab and field research for understanding animal behavior

Investigations of the neurophysiological processes underlying animal behaviors are almost exclusively done inside the laboratory, typically using few animal models born and reared under artificially stabilized conditions. Yet, animals living in the wild have to cope with much complex and variable environments. Thus, while the laboratory provides the technical possibilities for physiological research, the field offers a more realistic perspective about the animal´s behavioral abilities. We study neural circuits underlying the visually guided prey and predator behaviors in a semiterrestrial crab. By combining lab and field experiments we have, for example, found that the level of predation risk experienced by the animals in the wild affects the responsiveness of identified neurons involved in the animal escape response. Using this and other results from my lab I will illustrate and discuss the importance of complementing lab with field studies in wild animals for understanding the neural mechanisms subserving behavior.