This dataset includes dorsal and ventral photographs of Neotropical snakes collected in the Peruvian Amazon. These data were collected to survey and examine the diversity in color pattern evolution in Neotropical snakes.
Video documentation of natural behavior in wild snakes is very rare, so film from opportunistic encounters of snake interactions is very valuable to scientific researchers. Our research team includes leading experts on this species of snake (the Western Groundsnake, Sonora semiannulata), so we worked with the observer to submit a formal description of the encounter to a peer-reviewed journal and make the information available to the broader research community.
Animals in nature use diverse strategies to evade or deter their predators, including many vivid behavioural displays only qualitatively described from field encounters with natural predators or humans. Within venomous snake mimicry, stereotyped anti-predator displays are suggested to be a critical component of the warning signal given by toxic models and thus under strong selection for independent convergence in mimetic species. However, no studies have systematically quantified variation in snake anti-predator displays across taxonomically broad clades to test how these behaviours evolve across species within a phylogenetic comparative methods framework. Here we describe a new, high-throughput approach for collecting and scoring snake anti-predator displays in the field that demonstrates both low observer bias and infinite extension across any species. Then, we show our method's utility in quantitatively comparing the behaviour of 20 highly-divergent snake species from the Amazonian lowlands of Peru. We found that a simple experimental setup varying simulated predator cues was very successful in eliciting anti-predator displays across species and that high-speed videography captured a greater diversity of behavioural responses than described in the literature. We also found that although different display components evolve at different rates with complicated patterns of covariance, there is clear evidence of evolutionary convergence in anti-predator displays among distantly related elapid coral snakes and their colubrid mimics. We conclude that our approach significantly advances opportunity for future analyses of snake behaviour, kinematics, and the evolution of anti-predator signals more generally, especially macroevolutionary analyses across clades with similarly intractable behavioural diversity.
Alison R. Davis Rabosky, Talia Y. Moore, Ciara M. Sanchez-Paredes, Erin P. Westeen, Joanna G. Larson, Briana A. Sealey, Bailey A. Balinski (2020) Convergence and divergence in anti-predator displays: A novel approach to quantitative behavioural comparison in snakes. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blaa222
Free-roaming domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) pose major conservation and public health risks worldwide. To better understand the threat of domestic dogs to wildlife and people and add to the growing literature on free-roaming dog ecology, a study was conducted to estimate the dog population in Tulum, Mexico. A modified mark-recapture technique and program MARK were used to obtain dog population estimates along six different transects dividing the city.
This data repository includes the quantitative features of high frequency, intracranial EEG along with all necessary scripts to reproduce the figures of the accompanying manuscript.
Reconstructed CT slices for a right astragalar [astragalus] body of Cantius mckennai (University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology catalog number UMMP VP 81827), as a series of TIFF images. Raw projections are not included in this dataset.
Magnetospheric sawtooth oscillations are observed during strong and steady solar wind driving conditions. The simulation results of our global MHD model with embedded kinetic physics show that when the total magnetic flux carried by constant solar wind exceeds a threshold, sawtooth-like magnetospheric oscillations are generated. Different from previous works, this result is obtained without involving time-varying ionospheric outflow in the model. The oscillation period and amplitude agree well with observations. The simulated oscillations cover a wide range of local times, although the distribution of magnitude as a function of longitude is different from observations. Our comparative simulations using ideal or Hall MHD models do not produce global time-varying features, which suggests that kinetic reconnection physics in the magnetotail is a major contributing factor to sawtooth oscillations.
Jerboas (Jaculus jaculus) are bipedal hopping rodents that frequently transition between gaits (running, hopping, and skipping) throughout their entire speed range. It has been hypothesized that these non-cursorial bipedal gait transitions are likely to enhance their maneuverability and predator evasion ability. However, it is difficult to use the underlying dynamics of these locomotion patterns to predict gait transitions due to the large number of degrees of freedom expressed by the animals. To this end, we used empirical jerboa kinematics and dynamics to develop a unified Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum model with defined passive swing leg motions. The simulated trajectories from the model precisely matched the experimental data. Jerboas were observed to apply different neutral swing leg angles during locomotion. By investigating the gait structure of the model with coupled and uncoupled neutral swing leg, we found two set of mechanism may explain the frequent gait transitions of jerboas.
Ding, Moore, Gan (submitted) A template model explains jerboa gait transitions across a broad range of speeds. Frontiers in Bioengineering And Biotechnology
In this work, we trained gradient boosted trees using XGBoost to predict the SYM-H forecasting using different combinations of solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) parameters. Data are in csv and Python pickle formats.
Iong, D., Y. Chen, G. Toth, S. Zou, T. I. Pulkkinen, J. Ren, E. Camporeale, and T. I. Gombosi, New Findings from Explainable SYM-H Forecasting using Gradient Boosting Machines, Space Weather,11, accepted, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10508063.3