The SMART-BARN. Copyright: Christian Ziegler
Key points:
- A new large-scale research facility allows the complex behavior of animal groups to be studied in unprecedented detail.
- The barn-turned-lab can host diverse subjects, including 10,000 plague locusts as seen in a recent experiment.
- The researchers envision the lab as a collaborative space for others to visit and work.
Researchers in Germany have converted an 18th-century barn into a high-tech animal lab for complex behavioral analysis.
A major limitation in behavioral research is that scientists can either study animals under highly-controlled, yet often unrealistically simplified and small, environments in the lab, or in largely uncontrolled conditions in the wild. This has limited the ability to study many facets of behavior, including collective behavior—the movements and interactions among animals that underlie their complex social lives.
That has changed with the SMART-BARN—an acronym for Scalable Multimodal Arena for Real-time Tracking Behavior of Animals in large numbers. Recently, the barn served as a prototype for the largest swarm behavior lab at the University of Konstanz: the Imaging Hangar. There, researchers tracked 10,000 plague locusts—a feat that would have been impossible without the SMART-BARN.
“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,” said study author and computer scientist Hemal Naik. “SMART-BARN is designed to enhance the scale of typical indoor behavioral experiments in terms of experimental volume and measured behavior traits and group sizes. This means that users can measure previously unseen behavior repertoire because animals have more space.”
So far, SMART-BARN has been used within different experimental use cases involving subjects as diverse as pigeons, starlings, moth, bats and humans. It has also helped facilitate interdisciplinary research. For example, SMART-BARN offers the ability to track 3D gaze and posture of birds in a group of 10 or more while maintaining their identity. While the technique is being used by researchers to explore the role of gaze in decision making, it is also being used by computer scientists to design novel computer vision and AI-based algorithms facilitating 3D tracking of animals without attaching any markers to them.
“In a nutshell, the scope of its applications is only limited by our ability to come up with ideas of experimentation,” said researcher Máté Nagy.
The team imagines the facility to be a collaborative space where researchers from all over the globe can contribute to the exploration of behavioral questions.