DOI: 10.5061/dryad.41ns1rnmv
title: Data from: the flashy escape: support for dynamic flash colouration as anti-predator defence

description: Dynamic flash colouration is type of antipredator colouration where
 intermittently appearing colour patterns in moving animals misdirect
 predator attacks by obscuring the precise location and trajectory of the
 moving prey. Birds and butterflies with differing dorsoventral wing
 colouration or iridescent surface structures may potentially benefit from
 such effects. However, we lack an understanding of what makes for an
 effective dynamic flash colour design, and how much it benefits the
 carrier. Here, we test the effect of colour flashing using small passerine
 birds preying upon colourful, moving, virtual ‘prey’ stimuli on a
 touchscreen. We show that at fast speeds, green-to-blue flashing colour
 patterns can reduce the likelihood of pecks hitting the target, induce
 greater error in targeting accuracy and increase the number of pecks at a
 stimulus relative to similarly coloured non-flashing targets. Our results
 support the idea that dynamic flash colouration can deflect predatory
 attacks at fast speeds, but the effect may be the opposite when moving
 slowly.
description: Behavioural experiments with wild Eurasian bluetits
 (<em>Cyanistes caeruleus</em>) using a custom-built
 Touchscreen Operant Chamber (TOC) with a touchscreen specially made for
 bird beak. The program created for testing birds with the TOC system
 collected all the relevant information that was processed minimally before
 analysing the data with RStudio.
description: # The flashy escape: Support for dynamic flash colouration as
 anti-predator defence ##
 Description of the data and file structure The dataset used in this
 experiment was gained from a touchscreen in the Touchscreen Operant
 Chamber (TOC) using Eurasian blue tits (*Cyanistes caeruleus*) as study
 subjects. In the experiment, wild birds were used to test if colour
 flashing affects the catching of moving stimuli on a touchscreen. The two
 data files are in CSV file format. The main dataset is called
 “**TOC_data_2**”, consisting of recorded touches to the TOC touchscreen
 (i.e., each row represents a peck by a bird to the screen). TOC_data_2
 includes the following: the ID of the study subjects (bird ID), session ID
 (SessionName), stimulus ID (TargetID), binomial information on whether the
 stimulus was hit (TargetKilledBinary), peck distance to stimulus edge
 (DistToStimEdge), stimulus speed (Speed_cm_s), and stimulus colour
 (StimCol). Colour abbreviations are G = green, B = blue, LG = light green,
 G-B = green-blue, and G-LG = green-light green. We summarised data from
 TOC_data_2 into “**TOC_summary_per_trial_2**”. In the
 TOC_summary_per_trial_2-file, each row represents a unique stimulus
 (TRIAL) in terms of colour (STIM COLOUR) and speed (SPEED_CM_S) presented
 to each bird (BIRD). Variable SPEED CAT is a simplified categorical
 variable for SPEED_CM_S (i.e., SPEED CAT '0' corresponds to
 SPEED_CM_S '0', and SPEED CAT '1', corresponds to the
 velocity of 1.14 cm/s, and so on). This file summarises whether the
 stimulus type was caught (OUTCOME, the variable is binomial 1 / 0), and
 how many pecks it got (Pecks_total). Colours are abbreviated similarly as
 in TOC_data_2. Data was analysed in RStudio (v. 2023.06.2) using the
 ’lme4’ package (v. 1.1-34). The R file is named **TOC_FINAL_2**.