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