A Machine-Learning Based Real-Time Analysis to Quantify the Effects of Gut Microbes in Social Insect Collective Behavior

EasyChair Preprint 1669

Abstract

Researchers in gastroenterology, microbiology and neuroscience employ animal models to investigate the role of gut microbes in socially relevant behavior. Surprisingly, despite being lab-friendly models for sociality-related questions, group-living insects receive little attention from this perspective. Nonetheless, insect social behavior research is currently undergoing a radical transition, thanks to the increasing availability of high-throughput video tracking systems. However, these video tracking systems have minimal behavioral pattern identification and perform data analysis only a posteriori on previously recorded videos. Our goal is to study how gut microbes of individual ants affect the emerging properties of the whole colony, and develop a machine-learning based behavioral pattern classifier, to help us recognizes individual behavior in real-time. This intelligent tracking system will be connected with a processing backend for simultaneous data harvesting and analysis. The device will be used to monitor laboratory ant colonies including artificially gut microbe-remodelled workers in differential proportions. Generated datasets will include individual behavior, social interactions and colony-level information. There are two main predictable scenarios: 1) microbe remodelling-mediated individual behavioral changes do not affect the emerging properties of the group; 2) colony-level properties vary based on the presence/proportion of microbe-suppressed individuals. This study would be the first attempt to investigate the role of gut microbes on whole animal societies, and the first to provide these results in real-time.

Keyphrases: animal behavior, machine learning, social evolution, social insects, video tracking

@booklet{EasyChair:1669,
  author    = {Alessio Sclocco and Serafino Teseo},
  title     = {A Machine-Learning Based Real-Time Analysis to Quantify the Effects of Gut Microbes in Social Insect Collective Behavior},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1669},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}