An unsupervised method for quantifying the behavior of paired animals.

Publication Year
2017

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

Behaviors involving the interaction of multiple individuals are complex and frequently crucial for an animal's survival. These interactions, ranging across sensory modalities, length scales, and time scales, are often subtle and difficult to characterize. Contextual effects on the frequency of behaviors become even more difficult to quantify when physical interaction between animals interferes with conventional data analysis, e.g. due to visual occlusion. We introduce a method for quantifying behavior in fruit fly interaction that combines high-throughput video acquisition and tracking of individuals with recent unsupervised methods for capturing an animal's entire behavioral repertoire. We find behavioral differences between solitary flies and those paired with an individual of the opposite sex, identifying specific behaviors that are affected by social and spatial context. Our pipeline allows for a comprehensive description of the interaction between two individuals using unsupervised machine learning methods, and will be used to answer questions about the depth of complexity and variance in fruit fly courtship.

Journal
Phys Biol
Volume
14
Issue
1
Pages
015006
Date Published
02/2017
ISSN Number
1478-3975
Alternate Journal
Phys Biol
PMCID
PMC5414632
PMID
28140374