SwarmSight: Measuring the temporal progression of animal group activity levels from natural-scene and laboratory videos

Abstract

We describe SwarmSight (available at: https://github.com/justasb/SwarmSight), a novel, open-source, Microsoft Windows software tool for quantitative assessment of the temporal progression of animal group activity levels from recorded videos. The tool utilizes a background subtraction machine vision algorithm and provides an activity metric that can be used to quantitatively assess and compare animal group behavior. Here we demonstrate the tool utility by analyzing defensive bee behavior as modulated by alarm pheromones, wild bird feeding onset and interruption, and cockroach nest finding activity. While more sophisticated, commercial software packages are available, SwarmSight provides a low-cost, open-source, and easy-to-use alternative that is suitable for a wide range of users, including minimally trained research technicians and behavioral science undergraduate students in classroom laboratory settings.

Colony-level non-associative plasticity of alarm responses in the stingless honey bee, Tetragonisca angustula

“…We quantified the overall activity of colonies during different stimulus presentations by tracking frame-to-frame pixel changes (see Methods; Birgiolas et al 2016). There was significantly more activity during AP stimulation compared to mineral oil only (MO) stimulation for 5 of the 6 initial AP exposures (paired t-tests, p<0.001, 6 th at p=0.19).…”

“…We assessed overall colony activity using SwarmSight software (Birgiolas et al 2016; Table 1). SwarmSight analyzes pixel changes between frames over a set time.…”

“…We used SwarmSight to simultaneously quantify pixel changes during the mineral oil presentation and the alarm stimulus presentation. These bouts were filmed within 10 mins of each other from the same angle and distance, and we only collected these data when wind and other factors did not affect observed movement (see Birgiolas et al 2016 for further information). Thus we could use the mineral oil as a baseline control to quantify potential activity changes in the responses to alarm pheromone treatments.…”

SwarmSight: Real-Time Tracking of Insect Antenna Movements and Proboscis Extension Reflex using a Common Preparation and Conventional Hardware

“…Tasks like animal detection, counting, tracking, and place preference analyses have been aided with sophisticated software that can process videos of animal behavior and extract relevant measures [39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47] .…”

“…With the method described here, we extended our previous work on motion analysis software 41 to track the locations of insect antennae and proboscis with the following goals: (1) no requirement for special hardware or complex animal preparation, (2) frame processing at real-time (30 frames per second or faster) on a conventional computer, (3) ease of use, and (4) open-source, easily extendable code.…”