title: Mapping the stereotyped behaviour of freely moving fruit flies.
abstract: A frequent assumption in behavioural science is that most of an animal's activities can be described in terms of a small set of stereotyped motifs. Here, we introduce a method for mapping an animal's actions, relying only upon the underlying structure of postural movement data to organize and classify behaviours. Applying this method to the ground-based behaviour of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, we find that flies perform stereotyped actions roughly 50% of the time, discovering over 100 distinguishable, stereotyped behavioural states. These include multiple modes of locomotion and grooming. We use the resulting measurements as the basis for identifying subtle sex-specific behavioural differences and revealing the low-dimensional nature of animal motions.
authors.affiliation: Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Gordon J
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3588-7820
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Berman
authors.affiliation: Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Daniel M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Choi
authors.affiliation: Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bialek
authors.affiliation: Joseph Henry Laboratories of Physics and Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA shaevitz@princeton.edu.
authors.forename: Joshua W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Shaevitz
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006120:Grooming / Q000502:physiology; D008124:Locomotion / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013239:Stereotyped Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014741:Video Recording
keywords: Drosophila; behaviour; phase reconstruction; stereotypy; unsupervised learning