Behavioural methods articles within Nature Methods

Featured

  • This Month |

    Job-hunting is never easy, and more tasks get added on for members of the LGBTQ+ community as they search for welcoming environments.

    • Vivien Marx

  • News & Views |

    Two new toolkits that leverage deep-learning approaches can track the positions of multiple animals and estimate poses in different experimental paradigms.

    • Sena Agezo
    •  & Gordon J. Berman

  • This Month |

    Building a sustainable open source toolbox to track social behavior and how to get in the zone.

    • Vivien Marx

  • Article |

    DANNCE enables robust 3D tracking of animals’ limbs and other features in naturalistic environments by making use of a deep learning approach that incorporates geometric reasoning. DANNCE is demonstrated on behavioral sequences from rodents, marmosets, and chickadees.

    • Timothy W. Dunn
    • , Jesse D. Marshall
    •  & Bence P. Ölveczky

  • Article |

    EthoLoop enables real-time tracking and behavioral analysis of animals in naturalistic environments and can be combined with behavioral conditioning, optogenetic stimulation or wireless recording of neural activity. The system is illustrated with freely behaving mice and mouse lemurs.

    • Ali Nourizonoz
    • , Robert Zimmermann
    •  & Daniel Huber

  • News & Views |

    Plankton regularly travel vast distances up and down in the ocean. A water-filled hamster wheel with glass windows now enables detailed microscopic lab observations of individual aquatic microorganisms during their vertical migrations.

    • Katja M. Taute

  • Article |

    FreemoVR is a virtual reality system for freely moving animals. The versatile platform is demonstrated in various experiments with Drosophila, zebrafish, and mice.

    • John R Stowers
    • , Maximilian Hofbauer
    •  & Andrew D Straw

  • Brief Communication |

    Flyception is a tracking and imaging system that enables the monitoring of brain activity in freely walking fruit flies, making the analysis of calcium dynamics possible in studies of neural mechanisms such as those that underlie social behaviors.

    • Dhruv Grover
    • , Takeo Katsuki
    •  & Ralph J Greenspan

  • News & Views |

    Robots can be used to detect marked animals with less disturbance when assessing ecological drivers of population change.

    • Philip N Trathan
    •  & Louise Emmerson

  • Brief Communication |

    This paper investigates the stress levels and behavior of wild animals when approached by remote-operated vehicles versus humans for data collection in field research

    • Yvon Le Maho
    • , Jason D Whittington
    •  & Céline Le Bohec

  • This Month |

    An avian backpack for discerning individual zebra finches' songs and studying cognition comes to Switzerland via Novosibirsk, Russia.

    • Vivien Marx

  • Brief Communication |

    Communications between animals such as zebra finches can be discriminated with back-attached acceleration recorders. In contrast to microphones, these devices record the carrier's signals only, allowing a more precise analysis of individual vocalizations during social interactions.

    • Victor N Anisimov
    • , Joshua A Herbst
    •  & Alexei L Vyssotski

  • This Month |

    Lessons from the volleyball court help to compare ways to measure how much flies eat.

    • Vivien Marx

  • Brief Communication |

    A growing collection of segmented and feature-extracted videos recording locomotive behavior in hundreds of C. elegans mutant strains is made available for phenotyping and further analysis.

    • Eviatar Yemini
    • , Tadas Jucikas
    •  & William R Schafer

  • Brief Communication |

    Open-source software that allows biologists to create a variety of behavior classifiers for automatically annotating video of behaving animals is presented. The program, called JAABA, uses state-of-the-art machine-learning methods and is applicable to tracking data from different organisms, including mice and adult and larval Drosophila.

    • Mayank Kabra
    • , Alice A Robie
    •  & Kristin Branson

  • Commentary |

    Widely used behavioral assays need re-evaluation and validation against their intended use. We focus here on measures of chronic anxiety in mouse models and posit that widely used assays such as the open-field test are performed at the wrong time, for inadequate durations and using inappropriate mouse strains. We propose that behavioral assays be screened for usefulness on the basis of their replicability across laboratories.

    • Ehud Fonio
    • , Ilan Golani
    •  & Yoav Benjamini

  • Research Highlights |

    Fly rhythms under natural light and temperature differ from those in the lab.

    • Monya Baker

  • Research Highlights |

    Two methodological approaches allow researchers to manipulate the formation and reactivation of memories in mice.

    • Erika Pastrana

  • Editorial |

    As more mouse models are produced, researchers studying neuropsychiatric diseases will need better ways to evaluate them and more realistic assessment of the results.

  • Brief Communication |

    Mice handled by their tails show high levels of anxiety and stress compared to mice handled in cupped hands or in a transparent tunnel.

    • Jane L Hurst
    •  & Rebecca S West

  • News & Views |

    Assessing changes in facial expression may enable us to assess pain in animals more accurately and more effectively.

    • Paul A Flecknell

  • This Month |

    Putting a face on pain in mice should improve our ability to measure it.

    • Monya Baker

  • Research Highlights |

    Monitoring the activity of neurons in vivo in the freely behaving zebrafish larvae is now possible using bioluminescence, an approach with great potential for unveiling how neuronal networks control behavior.

    • Erika Pastrana

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Behavioural methods across other nature.com journals