Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have converted a former barn into a cutting-edge technology lab for complex behavioral analysis. In it, they can now study the intricate behavior of animal groups. The barn also served as a prototype for the largest swarm behavior lab at the University of Konstanz: the Imaging Hangar.
Both are available in an 18th-century barn at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Möggingen near Konstanz and now in the Imaging Hangar, a hall the size of a gymnasium at the University of Konstanz. Both labs are used to closely examine the group behavior of animals.
SMART-BARN is an acronym for Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behavior of Animals in large numbers."It is a new tool that allows studying complex behavior traits of an individual or interactions between groups of animals like insects, birds, or mammals," says Hemal Naik. Together with Máté Nagy, Co-Speaker of the Cluster, Iain Couzin, and colleagues developed SMART-BARN.
Máté Nagy explains,"We are using high throughput measurement techniques like optical and acoustic tracking, with which we can study the exact 3D position and posture of animals and calculate their field of view." Users of the new facility will have the flexibility to perform different experimental paradigms by leveraging the modular nature of the system.
The facility can—depending on the size of the animals—host 100s of animals simultaneously and extend the possibility of experiments to novel species typically not studied in indoor environments."In fact, we have now scaled this to work with many thousands of animals," adds Couzin,"We recently conducted a study in the Imaging Hangar where we tracked 10,000 plague locusts. This would have been impossible without our SMART-BARN technology.
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