Long timescale structure in Drosophila behavior

Animal behavior encompasses many timescales, from the shortest seconds-scale actions to daily circadian rhythms to aging across weeks, months, and years. Nearly all work on quantitative behavior has focused on behaviors on the short timescale, such as locomotion, grooming, and other sub-second and second-scale actions. An analysis of these data suggests there exists a large hierarchy of timescales; however, the limited duration of these experiments restricted the ability to investigate the full temporal structure (Berman, Bialek, & Shaevitz, 2016). To remedy this situation, we continuously recorded more than 50 individual Drosophila at a frame rate of 100Hz for weeks at a time, a substantial portion of their lifetime, in featureless arenas on sugar-agar media. The resulting recordings were analyzed using SLEAP (Pereira et al., 2020) to produce a full-body postural dataset with over 100 million pose instances per individual and a total of over 5 billion poses. We find rich features across timescales and present details of the dynamics of behavior across the lifespan of a fly.

G. J. Berman, W. Bialek, and J. W. Shaevitz, Proc National Acad Sci 113, 11943 (2016).

T. D. Pereira et al., bioRxiv 2020.08.31.276246 (2020).