Insights on the temporal resolution of quail behaviors

BARBERIS L.; SIMIAN C.; MARIN R. H.; KEMBRO J. M.

Foz do Iguazú

Congreso; Poultry Science Association, 3rd Latin American Scientific Conference; 2022

Poultry Science Association

Quail have high metabolic rates and hence, may have anenhanced temporal resolution of perception, where fast movements could beperceived by conspecific as social cues. Thus, high-resolution time scales(<1s) could hold biologically relevant information, especially within socialinteractions. However, relatively little focus has been placed on temporalorganization of different behaviors, especially in regard to the faster timescales. This study aimed to gain insight into the temporal dynamics ofbehavior by rethinking the definition of behavioral events. In this context, wealso explore the effect of the sampling interval used on the distribution ofevents. Two data-sets of adult quail social groups were explored. First, thelocomotor behavior of birds within 12 stable social groups (2 females: 1 male)was recorded at two sampling intervals 0.1 and 1s using IdTracker@ during1h. Second, in order to favor high-speed social interactions an unfamiliarmale was introduced into the home box of two females (6 groups). Highresolution(frame-by-frame; 66ms) data was recorded during 10min usingcustomized software in MATLAB@. We assessed Probability DensityFunctions (PDF) of the duration of behavioral events (i.e. continuous timeperforming a given behavior), providing statistical information regarding howlikely to occur is an event of a given duration. In the first data-set,assessment of the impact of sampling interval (0.1s vs. 1s) shows a relativelyhigher proportion of longer durations of mobility events is observed for thelower resolution (1s). Hence, the duration of active behaviors can be highlyoverestimated if the resolution of sampling is insufficient. On the contrary,with behaviors that reflect inter-event periods, such as immobility, the PDF oflarge events are not affected. In the second data-set, for most behaviorsrecorded, the most frequent event durations lasted <300 ms, indicating thatquail can transition between different behaviors at fast speeds. Notoriously,grabs and mounts can even last only 1 frame (~70ms). Hence, social cuesincluded in short pauses or fast transitions between different types of socialbehavior may go unrecognized when videos are analyzed at insufficient resolution. Lastly, we show that immobility type behaviors do not presentnormal distributions of event durations but rather show a power law (i.e.linearity on a double logarithmic plot), apparent at high-resolution (~70ms–10000ms). In all, our results highlight the importance of moving away fromanthropocentric ways of measuring behavior and redefining eventsstatistically based on the temporal scale pertinent to the species under studyand avoiding assumptions of normality in PDF.