AMoveE 2014: Frederic Bartumeus
Channel: Movebank
Date: 20/05/2014

This talk was presented by Frederic Bartumeus on 6 May 2014 as part of the Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment, held at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Bartumeus F, Panlilio M, Ryu W, Garriga J, 2014, "Multimodal search behaviour in a model organism"

Abstract: Movement is a fundamental feature of life. Organisms must search for prey or mates, avoid predators, or explore new habitats. Using novel methods and high-throughput data we seek to elucidate the behavioral strategies governing C. elegans searches and their effects on both ecological and evolutionary timescales. Studies of animal movement are often hindered by difficult observations over large spatiotemporal scales, unknown environmental conditions, and complex behavioral descriptions. C. elegans is a powerful model system for overcoming such challenges. In this study we capture high-resolution mass centroid positions and images of individual worms crawling through a large isotropic environment. Behavioral reorientation events are automatically flagged. We quantify local and global spatio-temporal searching scales, which over long times are modulated at least in part by the dynamics of distinct types of reorientation behavior. Moreover, since other reorientation types are known to be suppressed under starvation conditions, we propose that this long-term behavioral strategy acts as a compensatory mechanism to prevent both under and oversampling the environment.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Human Frontier Science Program and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (M.P.)