DOI: 10.5061/dryad.6m905qg6c
title: Collective synchrony of mating signals modulated by ecological cues and social signals in bioluminescent sea fireflies

description: Individuals often employ simple rules that can emergently synchronise
 behaviour. Some collective behaviours are intuitively beneficial, but
 others like mate signalling in leks occur across taxa despite theoretical
 individual costs. Whether disparate instances of synchronous signalling
 are similarly organised is unknown, largely due to challenges observing
 many individuals simultaneously. Recording field collectives and ex situ
 playback experiments, we describe principles of synchronous bioluminescent
 signals produced by marine ostracods (Crustacea; Luxorina) that seem
 behaviorally convergent with terrestrial fireflies, and with whom they
 last shared a common ancestor over 500 mya. Like synchronous fireflies,
 groups of signalling males use visual cues (intensity and duration of
 light) to decide when to signal. Individual ostracods also modulate their
 signal based on the distance to nearest neighbours. During peak darkness,
 luminescent "waves" of synchronous displays emerge and ripple
 across the sea floor every ~60 seconds, but such periodicity decays within
 and between nights after the full moon. Our data reveal these
 bioluminescent aggregations are sensitive to both ecological and social
 light sources. Because the function of collective signals is difficult to
 dissect, evolutionary convergence, like in the synchronous visual displays
 of diverse arthropods, provides natural replicates to understand the
 generalities that produce emergent group behaviour.
description: Data are a mixture of types from different methods and
 experiments. They are most clearly outliend and used in conjunciton with
 the provided R code for context. Briefly, the majority of data are from
 observations of collective bioluminescent behaviors of wild, naturally
 kept, or experimentally manipulated ostracods (marine crustaceans). We
 used either cameras or human observations to record data. Camera data was
 either post-processed using computer vision or annotated by eye to record
 the number of bright pixels or number of behaviors, respectively. One data
 set was collected with a spectroradiometer, as described in the methods of
 the paper. Images in the dataset are demonstrative of the
 methods.
description: # Collective synchrony of mating signals modulated by ecological cues and
 social signals in bioluminescent sea fireflies
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6m905qg6c](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6m905qg6c) These data are different video or human annotations of behavioral data when observing collective behaviors of bioluminescent mating signals. The goal of the R code and data include is to seamlessly recapitulate all analyses and figures from the manuscript. When downloading, as along as the paths to the datafile are changed to match the downloaded folder with the datasets (and proper dependencies are downloaded), everything else should run smoothly. Understanding the context and results of these data are best done in conjunction with the R code provided. In order to prevent the R code from experiencing difficulties, the data are left with blank cells, missing columns names, etc. and instead manipulated, cleaned, and processed entirely within the R environment. Any blank cells or columns are dealt with therein and do not need to be removed from the raw files provided. ## Description of the data and file structure Data provided consist of a few types to answer different questions. I outline the data and it's internal structure by each question, below: 1. Natural observations of wild collective displays * output\_238.png * 1 image (PNG) showing a single behavior in isolation * 8819\_ed2.png, 23783\_ed2.png, 40297\_ed2.png * 3 images (PNGs) representing different time points in a time series to show variation in the field of view (and behaviors) over time * 09\_27\_18\_right\_2\_beautified.csv * A csv file produced via opencv analysing the same time series video from whence the PNGs were produced. The data consist of the frame number, the average pixel brightness per frame, and the adjusted average pixel brightness per frame, which uses a gamma correction to adjust for variation in overall brightness between frames because cameras have a dynamic sensitivity. * EGD\_Field\_surverys\_data.xls * Human observations of collective behavioral events from 2018. Events are time stamped each night, date recorded, and in context with the date of the full moon and the time of sunset (and past sunset). Cardinal direction of collective event propagation was recorded but unused. * EGD\_2022\_field\_survey.xls * Human observations of collective behavioral events from 2022. Events are time stamped each night, date recorded, and in context with the date of the full moon and the time of sunset (and past sunset). 2. Quantitfying individual variation in displays within a collective * egd\_display\_data\_raw.csv * Individual behavior data collated into Table 1 in the paper. Data are collected from 3 different individuals or methods (Source; see text) but generally related to the aspects of the behavior that are relevant, namely: the number of pulses per display (pulse\_num), the duration of the pulse (time), the number of the interpulse interval (num\_ipi) and its duration (time\_ipi\_s), the horizontal distance between pulses (ipd\_distance\_mm), the vertical distance between pulses (vert\_dist\_mm), and the relative brightness per pulse compared to the first pulse within a display (relative\_brightness) * brightness\_analysis.csv * From a separate video, we calculated more relative brightness measurements using ImageJ. We outlined each pulse within a display, calculating its size (roi\_area), mean, min, and max pixel brightnesses, it's position in the frame (x and y), and the frame of the video (relative to the clip and within the entire clip; frame and frame\_true, respectively). We also measured the same measurements for an equally sized background area to account of changes in brightness due to other sources. We did for every frame each pulse was visible for, and for multiple displays. 3. Spatiotemporal analysis of observations in *ex situ* tanks from video, annotated by hand in Tracker * EGD\_XY\_24apr23.csv * In four unique tanks (deemed Trials in the paper), we manually annotated the position of single behaviors within the tanks. We noted the time, the position of the first pulse within a behavior (x\_pos, y\_pos), the total number of pulses within that display (num\_pulse), the tank designation (tank), the date, and the order within a date which the tank was observed in out of 4 total. * EGD\_XY\_26apr23.csv * Similar to the above dataset, but manual annotation were for timing and position of individual behaviors within tanks during experimental trials. We noted the time, position of a behavior (x\_pos, y\_pos), the frame within the video, the number of uses in a behavior (num\_pulse), the duration of the stimulus in seconds (stim\_duration), the tank designation, the date, the order of testing of a tank within a date, the starting frame of the stimulus (stim\_start), and the end frame of the stimulus (stim\_end) * EGD\_duration\_intensity\_trials.csv * A dataset of human observations counting the number of behaviors observed after the presentation of a stimulus for a number of experiments. We recorded the date, experimental stimulus type (Experiment), tank, the order of testing of the tank within a night (Tank\_order), the number of recorded displays during the acclimation period before the start of the experiment (Activity), whether the rank order of that background activity level across tanks within a night (Activity\_rank), the duration of the stimulus (Stimulus\_duration), the brightness of the stimulus (Brightness), the number of responding displays after the stimulus was presented (Response), the response level normalized to the background activity in the tank (Response\_normalized), the order of the three rounds of stimuli presentation within an experiment (Stimulus\_order), the order of the stimuli within a round of presentation (Trial\_order), the number of the rounds of presentation (Trial), the start time of the round of experiment (Start\_time), the program used to randomize the stimulus and trial orders, and whether to include the experiment in the final analysis. Experiments were excluded due to methodological difficulties during stimulus presentation. 4. Supplemental data * photeros\_data.csv * These are data mined from previous publications to contextualize our findings on the this species behavior with other known species; find citation in the paper. Data mined using WebPlotDigitizer. From the scatterplot we recorded the species, and the x (seconds) and y (cm) position of the point. With these, we calculated the pulse number within a behavior (pulse\_num; number of pulses), the duration of the pulse (pulse\_duration; in seconds), the time between pulses (interpulse\_interval; in seconds), the distance between pulses (interpulse\_distance; in cm), and the direction of pulse propagation relative to the previous pulse within a behavior (direction; up or down) * tod\_results.xlsx * These are spectrophotometer intensity measures of our stimulus at different power levels (measured in units; see methods in paper). Each column is a measurement at a different power level (below 50, 255, 200, 100, 50, 25, 5 units of power) for all wavelengths from 300 - 750 nm. For two power levels, we also measured wavelength intensities at a distance farther from the power source (tod\_middle\_255\_units and tod\_middle\_50\_units). ## Sharing/Access information Links to other publicly accessible locations of the data: * https://github.com/NikoHensley/ESM\_egd\_collective\_behavior ## Code/Software The provided R script should run with all the datasets included to generate every figure and supplementary figure in the paper, as well as perform any analyses. The R version, RStudio version, and R packages used are included in the paper.