Predator vs prey animal pairs3/31/2024 By eliciting a controlled fear response within the zebrafish from the robotic stimulus, the research demonstrated how transfer entropy can isolate the one-directional cause-and-effect relationship between a robotic replica and the zebrafish. The researchers tracked the zebrafish responses to both the replica and the live predator. The robot travelled on a dynamic and customizable trajectory that was pre-programmed to mimic the live fish’s typical predatory movements to incite a response within the zebrafish. The zebrafish swam freely within an arena-like setup around both the real and robotic predator, which in both cases was confined to the middle of the tank. In the case of their latest experiments, the team exposed live prey - zebrafish - to both a live red tiger oscar and a 3D version of the predator fish. Their robotics-based platform allows for manipulating and precisely controlling interactions better than is possible when using only live animals. In previous experiments, Porfiri and fellow researchers demonstrated the validity of robotic stimuli for experiments on animal behavior, showing that zebrafish exhibited an equivalent response to both live and robotic replicas of other zebrafish and predators. The paper, “Information Theory and Robotics Meet to Study Predator-Prey Interactions,” was written by Porfiri, Visiting Research Fellow and lead author Daniele Neri, NYU Tandon Dynamical Systems Laboratory Manager and Research Scientist Tommaso Ruberto, and Tandon undergraduate researcher Gabrielle Cord-Cruz. The research detailed in the paper explores how a combination of robotics and transfer entropy can offer new insight into the analysis of predator-prey interactions and improve our understanding of fear and anxiety. Transfer entropy examines the transfer of information between two entities and has become widely applied in fields such as neuroscience and economics, but it is only recently emerging as a tool for studying animal behavior. NYU Tandon engineers created a biomimetic robot that looked and swam like a real red tiger oscar. “The question we want to ultimately understand is, if we put together a predator and its prey, how they are influencing each other? How does the predator’s behavior change due to the presence of the prey, and how does the presence of the predator change the response of the prey?” “Within a context of two entities - the predator and prey - seeking entirely different outcomes, robotics provides us with a tool for validating the concept of transfer entropy to discover cause-and-effect relationships and to answer certain biological questions,” Porfiri said. Through the use of robotic fish, the research provides a foundation for controlled experiments of causation within such interactions. In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics’ Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, the research team led by Maurizio Porfiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU Tandon, validated the use of information theory to study predator-prey interactions. We are looking for whether and for how long prey ungulates respond to this artificially elevated risk by avoiding these sites or depressing their activity levels.BROOKLYN, New York – With help from robotic fish, researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering are demonstrating how information theory can offer insight into the cause-and-effect relationships between predator and prey in the animal kingdom. Within the camera trap grid, Meredith has simulated “lion” activity by conducting playbacks of lion roars at a subset of camera sites. Short-term behavioral changes are rarely investigated, and little information is available on the factors that select for short- over long-term avoidance nor the time-scale (i.e., hours, days, weeks) of these responses. Prey could obtain additional foraging opportunities by utilizing more of the landscape, while suffering compensatory costs from devoting additional time and energy to predator detection and defense. Prey may compensate for these inabilities - or supplement their broad-scale responses - by instead avoiding areas that predators have frequented within the previous few hours or days. Landscape-level antipredator behaviors may not manifest if prey cannot predict predator activity patterns or are unable to pay the fitness costs of avoiding predators long-term.
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