Fish Have Feelings Too!

Hey guys, Tyrone here! I’m feeling down lately because I’ve been dealing with bullying a lot, especially from Burt. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I should act when he inevitably decides to be mean to me again. Fortunately, the scientists in the lab care about my behavior and want to figure out what makes a fish susceptible or resilient to bullies like Burt!

Lateral display by two dominant male cichlid fish

To cheer myself up, today I want to tell you all about the fun way the scientists study my behavior after repeatedly being bullied in a resident-intruder experiment (if you don’t remember the details check out my previous blog posts about this!).

The scientists start with videos of these experiments to quantify our behavior. They specifically want to see how the intruder (like me, Tyrone) reacts to aggression from the resident (like Burt). By using a cool program called BORIS (which stands for Behavioral Observation Research Interactive Software) they are able to see just how often and for how long we display certain behaviors. What behaviors you might ask? Let’s start with Burt’s. Burt tends to be aggressive towards me; he usually starts off trying to exert his dominance over me with a lateral display. During a lateral display Burt will expand his fins, circle me, and aggressively push water at me to show off his size and strength (see Figure 1 for an example of what this looks like). Sometimes if he feels that isn’t enough, he lunges or nips (ouch!). Lunges are intimidating as he swims up quickly and sometimes rams into me, but the nips where he bites me startle me more and cause me to flinch! My behaviors can also be recorded in BORIS!

Sometimes I challenge Burt back and my aggressive behaviors are also recorded, but I typically react in one of two ways: I either freeze up or search for a way to escape. Freezing means I just hide in a corner of the tank and stay very still hoping Burt won’t bother me (although it usually doesn’t stop him). Other times, I search for a way out by swimming up and down in a very distinct pattern against the walls of the tank. By studying these behaviors, scientists are able to tell if I am resilient or susceptible to chronic social defeat. Observing how I handle Burt’s excessive bullying can help scientists learn how bullying affects our behavior and brains. This information could even have implications for you since all species deal with some form of bullying. Whether this is an issue with habitat competition, mating, dominance, or in human terms, social issues with peers.


BORIS is a fantastic program that has saved scientists in Dr. Maruska’s lab a lot of headaches (thanks to the other scientists that developed this software tool!) They used to have to quantify behavior by hand using pen and paper, but now they have BORIS. BORIS is set up with keys coding for the subject (like me or Burt) and each specific behavior. To start, scientists have to press either the “r” key for resident or “i” for intruder to quantify behaviors for the correct subject. When quantifying behavior, a scientist can watch Burt nip me and simply press the “n” key on their computer and BORIS marks Burt’s nip exactly when it happens. Since nipping is what scientists call a “point event”, they only have to press the key once. Point events mean it happens once at the time the key is pressed while a “state event” means it has a start and stop time for the behavior. State events include lateral displays, searching, and freezing. For example, when I search, you have to press “s” for when I start and “s” again when I stop. This allows BORIS to accurately show when I search and for how long. On the right you can see each event recorded and its time. After the video is done being quantified, BORIS can pull up an analysis plot of the behaviors from each subject (see Figure 3 to for an example). BORIS has changed the way scientists in the lab gather their data for the better; saving them time and giving the resources to put their results directly into their papers to share with other scientists!

Example of analysis plot of fish behaviors from BORIS

 

Friard,O. and Gamba, M. (2016), BORIS: a free, versatile open-sourse event-logging software for video/audio coding and live observations. Methods Ecol Evol, 7: 1325-1330.

DOI:10.1111/2041-210X.12584

Art by Rose Wayne

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 14, 2022 at 2:29 AM

    Thank you for this technical post! Just a typo in the paper reference "Friar" should be "Friard"

    ReplyDelete

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