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- Creator:
- Moore, Talia Y., Danforth, Shannon M., Larson, Joanna G., and Davis Rabosky, Alison R.
- Description:
- Warning signals in chemically defended organisms are critical components of predator-prey interactions, often requiring multiple coordinated display components for a signal to be effective. When threatened by a predator, venomous coral snakes (genus Micrurus) display a vigorous, non-locomotory thrashing behaviour that has been only qualitatively described. Given the high-contrast and often colourful banding patterns of these snakes, this thrashing display is hypothesized to be a key component of a complex aposematic signal under strong stabilizing selection across species in a mimicry system. By experimentally testing snake response across simulated predator cues, we analysed variation in the presence and expression of a thrashing display across five species of South American coral snakes. Although the major features of the thrash display were conserved across species, we found significant variation in the propensity to perform a display at all, the duration of thrashing, and the curvature of snake bodies that was mediated by predator cue type, snake body size, and species identity. We also found an interaction between curve magnitude and body location that clearly shows which parts of the display vary most across individuals and species. Our results suggest that contrary to the assumption in the literature that all species and individuals perform the same display, a high degree of variation persists in thrashing behaviour exhibited by Micrurus coral snakes despite presumably strong selection to converge on a common signal. This quantitative behavioural characterization presents a new framework for analysing the non-locomotory motions displayed by snakes in a broader ecological context, especially for signalling systems with complex interaction across multiple modalities.
- Keyword:
- aposematism, biomechanics, coral snake mimicry, curvature, Elapidae, non-locomotory motion, Peruvian Amazon, and snake behaviour
- Citation to related publication:
- Moore, T. Y., Danforth, S. M., Larson, J. G., & Davis Rabosky, A. R. (2020). A Quantitative Analysis of Micrurus Coral Snakes Reveals Unexpected Variation in Stereotyped Anti-Predator Displays Within a Mimicry System. Integrative Organismal Biology, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa006
- Discipline:
- Science
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- Creator:
- Holmes, Patrick
- Description:
- This work was collected to evaluate Stability Basins for characterizing the limits of human stability during Sit-to-Stand. and MATLAB code was used to process the data into individual trials. Trials are labeled by Sit-to-Stand type (Natural, Momentum-Transfer, or Quasi-Static) and experimental condition. MATLAB code for analyzing the data and computing Stability Basins is provided. A GUI is provided to animate a subject's movement and display projections of the Stability Basins in the horizontal and vertical planes.
- Keyword:
- biomechanics, mathematical model, locomotion, fall risk, reachability, and feedback control
- Citation to related publication:
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01876 and Holmes, P. D., Danforth, S. M., Fu, X.-Y., Moore, T. Y., & Vasudevan, R. (n.d.). Characterizing the limits of human stability during motion: Perturbative experiment validates a model-based approach for the Sit-to-Stand task. Royal Society Open Science, 7(1), 191410. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191410
- Discipline:
- Engineering