Animal Behavior and Cognition

DeePosit: an AI-based tool for detecting mouse urine and fecal depositions from thermal video clips of behavioral experiments

1. David Peles
2. Shai Netser
3. Natalie Ray
4. Shlomo Wagner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript presents a valuable machine-learning-based approach to the automated detection of urine and fecal deposits by rodents, key ethological behaviors that have traditionally been very poorly studied. The strength of evidence for their claim, however, that the method provides "easy, efficient, and unbiased spatiotemporal analysis of scent marking during behavioral experiments" is incomplete. In particular, there were concerns about the generalizability of the approach, the relatively limited detection capabilities of the method, and a lack of rationale for specific design choices. This manuscript could be of interest to researchers in animal behavior, neuroscience, and automated animal tracking.

Reviewed by eLife

Developmental stage shapes the realized energy landscape for a flight specialist

1. Elham Nourani
2. Louise Faure
3. Hester Brønnvik
4. Martina Scacco
5. Enrico Bassi
6. Wolfgang Fiedler
7. Martin U Grüebler
8. Julia S Hatzl
9. David Jenny
10. Andrea Roverselli
11. Petra Sumasgutner
12. Matthias Tschumi
13. Martin Wikelski
14. Kamran Safi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study substantially advances our understanding of energy landscapes and their link to animal ontogeny. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with high-throughput telemetry data and advanced track segmentation methods used to develop and map energy landscapes. The work will be of broad interest to animal ecologists.

Reviewed by eLife

Why the brown ghost chirps at night

1. Livio Oboti
2. Federico Pedraja
3. Marie Ritter
4. Marlena Lohse
5. Lennart Klette
6. Rüdiger Krahe

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study addresses a question in sensory ethology and active sensing in particular. It links the production of a specific signal - electrosensory chirps - to various contexts and conditions to argue that the main function is to enhance conspecific localization rather than communication as previously believed. The study provides a lot of valuable data, but the methods section is incomplete making it difficult to evaluate the claims.

Reviewed by eLife

Acquisition of auditory discrimination mediated by different processes through two distinct circuits linked to the lateral striatum

1. Susumu Setogawa
2. Takashi Okauchi
3. Di Hu
4. Yasuhiro Wada
5. Keigo Hikishima
6. Hirotaka Onoe
7. Kayo Nishizawa
8. Nobuyuki Sakayori
9. Hiroyuki Miyawaki
10. Takuma Kitanishi
11. Kenji Mizuseki
12. Yilong Cui
13. Kazuto Kobayashi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides a potentially valuable understanding of the contribution of different striatal subregions, the anterior Dorsal Lateral Striatum (aDLS) and the posterior Ventrolateral Striatum (pVLS), to auditory discrimination learning. The combined methods used to probe this are compelling, yet the data presented are incomplete to support the conclusions. There is insufficient data visualization of learning vs. performance, and missing details about timing of manipulations and microPET imaging.

Reviewed by eLife

Individual recognition in a jumping spider (Phidippus regius)

1. Christoph D Dahl
2. Yaling Cheng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides a valuable examination of the social recognition abilities of a jumping spider, Phippidus regius. Behavioral essays yielded solid evidence that these spiders discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals on the basis of visual cues, but the experimental support for individual recognition and long-term memory is incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Scale-sensitive Mouse Facial Expression Pipeline using a Surrogate Calibration Task

1. Andre Telfer
2. Oliver van Kaick
3. Alfonso Abizaid

Reviewed by PREreview

ASBAR: an Animal Skeleton-Based Action Recognition framework. Recognizing great ape behaviors in the wild using pose estimation with domain adaptation

1. Michael Fuchs
2. Emilie Genty
3. Klaus Zuberbühler
4. Paul Cotofrei

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This valuable study presents a new framework (ASBAR) that combines open-source toolboxes for pose estimation and behavior recognition to automate the process of categorizing behaviors in wild apes from video data. The authors present compelling evidence that this pipeline can categorize simple wild ape behaviors from out-of-context video at a similar level of accuracy as previous models, while simultaneously vastly reducing the size of the model. The study's results should be of particular interest to primatologists and other behavioral biologists working with natural populations.

Reviewed by eLife

Interdependence between SEB-3 and NLP-49 peptides shifts across predator-induced defensive behavioral modes in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Kathleen T Quach
2. Gillian A Hughes
3. Sreekanth H Chalasani

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents a valuable finding on predator threat detection in C. elegans and the role of neuropeptide systems in defensive behavioral strategies. The evidence supporting the conclusions is solid, although additional analyses and control experiments would strengthen the claims of the study. Overall, the work is of interest to the C. elegans community as well as neuroethologists and ecologists studying predator-prey interactions.

Reviewed by eLife

Specific Sensitivity to Rare and Extreme Events: Quasi-Complete Black Swan Avoidance vs Partial Jackpot Seeking in Rat Decision-Making

1. Mickaël Degoulet
2. Louis-Matis Willem
3. Christelle Baunez
4. Stéphane Luchini
5. Patrick A Pintus

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study represents an important contribution to the study of decision-making under risk, bringing an interdisciplinary approach spanning economic theory, behavioral neuroscience, and computational modeling to test how choice preference is influenced by rare and extreme events. The authors present evidence that rats are indeed sensitive to these rare and extreme events despite their infrequent occurrence, driven primarily by an almost complete avoidance of "Black Swans" - rare and extreme losses. The evidence for specific sensitivity to rare and extreme events however remains incomplete, owing in part to the difficulty of isolating the effect of these events beyond that arising from risk preferences more generally in both task design and in the computational modeling of the choice behavior. Given the approach here brings a relatively novel perspective, with a more detailed treatment of these confounds this paper will be of broad interest to those seeking to understand animal behavior through the lens of economic choice.

Reviewed by eLife

Switching perspective: Comparing ground-level and bird’s-eye views for bees navigating clutter

1. Annkathrin Sonntag
2. Odile Sauzet
3. Mathieu Lihoreau
4. Martin Egelhaaf
5. Olivier Bertrand

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this useful study, the authors tested the ability of bumblebees to use bird-view and ground-view for homing in cluttered landscapes using modeling and behavioral experiments, claiming that bumblebees rely most on ground-views for homing. However, due to a lack of analysis of the bees' behavior during training and a lack of information as to how the homing behavior of bees develops over time, the evidence supporting their claims is currently incomplete. Moreover, there was concern that the experimental environment was not representative of natural scenes, thus limiting the findings of the study.

Reviewed by eLife