Dung beetles are remarkably adept at rolling dung balls in perfectly straight lines, but now Nienke Bijma & co have discovered that the tenacious beetles are thrown off course and forced to follow channels in uneven terrain and often lose control of their precious balls of dung
Hey all, still as part of the #MoveToMasto Movement, and because we’re a bunch of honest people, let’s list all the things we think could be improved here on #Mastodon:
(I’ll start - in no specific order. I've also added workarounds when I knew about them)
(See this other post for the positive aspects)
[1] No feedback on your boosts: do people like them? boost them? 🤷
[2] You can’t easily see all the answers to someone else’s post
[unless you go to their instance's website]
[3] Some great-looking accounts haven’t actually been active for a long time
[but you can see "last active date" on your "follows and followers" Settings]
[4] you can't easily quote posts
[except with some apps, also this is coming soon in Masto!]
[5] You can easily miss very relevant content
[a customizable algo might be coming at some point on our instance!]
[6] (very specific to me) there are not enough #BehaviouralNeuroscience or #NeuroEthology people
[if you know any, tell them to come here!]
[7] the new search is great but doesn’t search ALL of Mastodon’s public posts
[you can always do a search from outside, say with DuckDuckGo]
[8] you can't easily see only the posts of a profile
[but you can use https://justmytoots.com/ for this]
[9] …?
Please do add your own!
Edit: I updated the list, thanks to contributions of @diazona, @thefalcon 🙏
"High Resolution Outdoor Videography of Insects Using Fast Lock-On Tracking"
We glue a tiny reflector on a bee. Using its reflection, robotic Fast Lock-On (FLO) tracking keeps a telescope focused on the bee flying in the wild. FLO also works from a drone.
The application deadline has been extended for this conference to Oct 22:
Bridging Diverse Perspectives on the Mechanistic Basis of Foraging
Date: February 25 - 28, 2024
Where: I’m guessing Janelia Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia, USA
No fees. Hotel + meals covered. Travel support available!
🎓 I'm Mikkel, I'm a PhD student at University of Sussex doing #neuroethology, currently working on sleep in insects.
🗺️ A winding road has taken me from Sports Science (biomechanics, motor control and learning) to #neuroscience, thinking about brains in the context of ecology and evolution.
🏕️ Outside of work, I love spending time in the outdoors, from caves to mountain tops. I also enjoy any type of sport, photography, singing, my piano and books.
@elduvelle_neuro
A fruitfly walking back and forward in a glass tube during locomotor recording with neurogenetic interventions is behavioural #neuroscience but probably not #neuroethology; a closest case for the latter I can think of is the RFID tagged bumble #bee tracking in its natural hive...but I am not aware anyone record neural activity for this
To slightly rephrase what others have stated - #neurothology studies the mechanisms that the brain has evolved to function in its natural conditions. If I were to draw a venn diagram for this, there could be/is an intersection between the 2 sets (behavioral neuroscience and neuroethology) but they are 2 different sets. There's #EfficientCoding based on response to natural statistics of the animal's environment that I think lies at the intersection. While there may be a behavioral response to a stimulus in the lab, it doesn't mean that the stimulus even exists in the statistics of the animal's natural environment.
In a lab, you can rewire the auditory cortex of a ferret's brain and they can start "seeing" with their auditory cortex but it doesn't mean that in a "normal" animal's brain that's what happens.
I think of it this way -- there could be several mechanisms to achieve the same output (behavior) in a lab setting but that doesn't mean that the brain actually uses any or all of those mechanisms in its natural environment. Heck, even in the natural environment the brain could (and very likely does) exhibit #degeneracy where distinct structural units could give rise to the same function (behavior) under different circumstances.
Also, given the diversity of responses to the OP, adding #neurobuzz@neurobuzz 🙂
Nightingales are great singers, but how well can they hit the tone? 🎶 Scientists from Daniela Vallentin’s group at our institute found that nightingales can imitate the pitch of whistles in real time! Read more: https://www.bi.mpg.de/news/2023-07-vallentin
I’m super pumped to release #SuperAnimal models: for animal behavior, they can be zero shot for many, and if you need to fine tune, it’s 10X less data and 2X performance over the latest best pose models - please road test it!
It’s in Google Colab, so zero install needed✨
We have loads of macaque video we’d gladly contribute. Our issue has been human bandwidth for labeling and getting 3-D pose. What’s tricky for us is that the camera captures mostly outward-facing activity (on touchscreens at the periphery).