Biology subjects

Reid, C. R.

Publications and source records attributed to Reid, C. R..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2022

Weaver ants regulate the rate of prey delivery during collective vertical transport

The collective transport of massive food items by ant teams is a striking example of biological cooperation, but it remains unclear how these decentralized teams coordinate to overcome the various challenges associated with transport. Previous research has focused on transport across horizontal surfaces and very shallow inclines, disregarding the complexity of natural foraging environments. In the ant Oecophylla smaragdina, prey are routinely carried up tree trunks to arboreal nests. Using this species, we induce collective transport over a variety of angled surfaces with varying prey masses to investigate how ants respond to inclines. We found that weight and incline pose qualitatively different challenges during transport. Prey were carried over vertical inclines faster than across horizontal surfaces even though inclines were associated with longer routes and a higher probability of dropping the load. This additional speed is associated with more transporters being allocated to vertical loads and not from the persistence of individual ants. Ant teams also regulated a stable "prey delivery rate" (rate of return per transporter) across all treatments. Our proposed constrained optimization model explains these results: prey intake rate at the colony level is maximized when the allocation of transporters yields a similar prey delivery rate across loads.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2020

Fish avoid visually noisy environments that reduce their perceptual abilities

The environment contains different forms of ecological noise that can reduce the ability of animals to detect information. Here we ask whether animals can adapt their behaviour to either exploit or avoid areas of their environment with increased dynamic visual noise. By immersing three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus) into environments with a simulated form of naturally occurring visual noise - light bands created by the refraction of light from surface waves termed caustic networks - we tested how such visual noise affected the movements, habitat use, and perceptual abilities of these fish. Fish avoided areas of higher visual noise, and achieved this by increasing their activity as a function of the locally perceived noise level, resulting in individuals moving away from noisier areas. By projecting virtual prey into the environment with different levels of visual noise, we found that the fishs ability to visually detect prey decreased as visual noise increased. We found no evidence that fish increased their exploration (and decreased their refuge use) in environments with increased visual noise, which would have been predicted if they were exploiting increased visual noise to reduce their own likelihood of being detected. Our results indicate that animals can use simple behavioural strategies to mitigate the impacts of dynamic visual noise on their perceptual abilities, thereby improving their likelihood of gathering information in dynamically changing and noisy environments.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2019

A Petascale Automated Imaging Pipeline for Mapping Neuronal Circuits with High-throughput Transmission Electron Microscopy

Serial-section electron microscopy is the method of choice for studying cellular structure and network connectivity in the brain. We have built a pipeline of parallel imaging using transmission electron automated microscopes (piTEAM) that scales this technology and enables the acquisition of petascale datasets containing local cortical microcircuits. The distributed platform is composed of multiple transmission electron microscopes that image, in parallel, different sections from the same block of tissue, all under control of a custom acquisition software (pyTEM) that implements 24/7 continuous autonomous imaging. The suitability of this architecture for large scale electron microscopy imaging was demonstrated by acquiring a volume of more than 1 mm3 of mouse neocortex spanning four different visual areas. Over 26,500 ultrathin tissue sections were imaged, yielding a dataset of more than 2 petabytes. Our current burst imaging rate is 500 Mpixel/s (image capture only) per microscope and net imaging rate is 100 Mpixel/s (including stage movement, image capture, quality control, and post processing). This brings the combined burst acquisition rate of the pipeline to 3 Gpixel/s and the net rate to 600 Mpixel/s with six microscopes running acquisition in parallel, which allowed imaging a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex at synaptic resolution in less than 6 months.

neuroscience↗