Biology subjects

calcagno, v.

Publications and source records attributed to calcagno, v..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

MoveR: an R package for easy processing and analysis of animal video-tracking data

Animal movement and behavior are critical to understanding ecological and evolutionary processes. Recent years have witnessed an increase in methodological and technological innovations in video-tracking solutions for phenotyping animal behavior. Although these advances enable the collection of high-resolution data describing the movement of multiple individuals, analyzing and interpreting them remains challenging due to their complexity, heterogeneity, and noisiness. Here, we introduce MoveR, an R package for importing, filtering, visualizing, and analyzing data from common video-tracking solutions. MoveR includes flexible tools for polishing data, removing tracking artifacts, subsetting and plotting individual paths, and computing different movement and behavior metrics. Metadata O_TBL View this table: org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@1f29c17org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@e5d302org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@804997org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@5f7161org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@cb32a_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_TBL C_TBL

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Up and to the light: intra- and interspecific variability of photo- and geo-tactic oviposition preferences in genus Trichogramma

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWTrichogramma are parasitic microwasps much used as biological control agents. The genus is known to harbor tremendous diversity, at both inter- and intra-specific levels. The successful selection of Trichogramma strains for biocontrol depends on characterizing the existing diversity in this group, especially regarding oviposition performance and behavior. Oviposition preferences in relation to environmental cues such as light and gravity have received little attention so far, although they are suspected to play an important role in microhabitat selection and parasitism patterns. The extent of their variability, and their potential correlated variations, is virtually unknown. Here we use a novel experimental approach relying on automatic image analysis to characterize the oviposition preferences in relation to light and gravity, as well as their interaction, in 25 populations of Trichogramma from five species. We show that most Trichogramma populations and species harbour preferences for light and preferences for elevated parts. However, the two traits harbor significant inter and intraspecific variation. The effects of light and gravity on oviposition patterns were found to be almost perfectly additive overall, with two exceptions. Oviposition preference patterns were not static but very plastic in time: preferences tended to relax over consecutive days, and the strongest preferences relaxed the fastest, presumably because of the density-dependent effect of resource depletion. A correlation of oviposition patterns with the vegetation stratum at which populations were sampled suggests that different species/populations may be associated with different strata with corresponding differentiation in light- and gravity-related oviposition preferences. This article has been peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Zoology doi: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.zool.100008

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

How optimal foragers should respond to habitat changes? On the consequences of habitat conversion.

The Marginal Value Theorem (MVT) provides a framework to predict how habitat modifications related to the distribution of resources over patches should impact the realized fitness of individuals and their optimal rate of movement (or patch residence times) across the habitat. Most MVT theory has focused on the consequences of changing the shape of the gain functions in some patches, describing for instance patch enrichment. However an alternative form of habitat modification is habitat conversion, whereby patches are converted from one existing type to another (e.g. closed habitat to open habitat). In such a case the set of gain functions existing in the habitat does not change, only their relative frequencies does. This has received comparatively very little attention in the context of the MVT. Here we analyze mathematically the consequences of habitat conversion under the MVT. We study how realized fitness and the average rate of movement should respond to changes in the frequency distribution of patch-types, and how they should covary. We further compare the response of optimal and non-plastic foragers. We find that the initial pattern of patch-exploitation in a habitat, characterized by the regression slope of patch yields over residence times, can help predict the qualitative responses of fitness and movement rate following habitat conversion. We also find that for some habitat conversion patterns, optimal and non-plastic foragers exhibit qualitatively different responses, and that adaptive foragers can have opposite responses in the early and late phases following habitat conversion. We suggest taking into account behavioral responses may help better understand the ecological consequences of habitat conversion.

ecology↗