Set of behavioral tests performed in adult Japanese quail comparing different methods of attachment of acclerometers (patch vs backpack)

 

On day 1, each pair of females (housed together) and the corresponding experimental male were assigned to an experimental group depending on whether they remained without wearing any accelerometers (Control) or accelerometers were placed using one of two attachment systems for a TechnoSmArt@ accelerometer (9.5x15x4mm 0.7 g): 

BACKPACK: a plastic platform with two elastic bands on their sides that are passed arround the base of the animal's wings was used to hold the accelerometer on the dorsum above the scapula area.

PATCH:the accelerometer was attached to a self-adhesive fabric patch (“Athletic Tape”), subsequently surgical glue was used to adhere the device to the synsacrum area of the animal's dorsum, which was previously plucked manually.

TESTS:

Immediate response: After handling and/or attaching accelerometers, the birds were returned to their home box and their behaviour was videotaped for 15 minutes. Twenty-two behaviours were recorded according to the high-resolution ethogram using a MATLAB® app,  In this case a sampling interval of 1s was used.

Response after a 24h habituation period: Cameras were activated remotely and female behavior was recorded, during 10 min, 24 h after handling and/or attaching devices. To facilitate data collection the ANY-maze™ Video Tracking System was used to analyse video-recordings, which also allows recording the behaviors detected by the observer by means of an alphabetical key. Also, based on the results from day 1, only the most frequently observed behaviors were studied.

Male-females interaction test: On the 8th day of experimentation a male of the same treatment group was assigned to a home-box. Before being introduced into the home-box a protocol to synchronise the video with the accelerometer signal was performed. With the accelerometer and the video recorder turned on, each male was gently handled to favour a position in which the male stayed still for 1 minute. After this, a series of up and down movements were performed, followed by another minute of stillness. After this synchronisation protocol, the male was released and remained in the home-box during a 1h period. In the resulting video, every frame (15 frames per second) was analysed during 10 min. Thus, from each of these trials, 2 time series were obtained, one consisting of the series of behaviors performed during that time and the other consisting of the accelerometry signal.  

Novel object test:  On day 9 of the experiment (Fig. 1), a 5 cm diameter ball was placed in the centre of each home box, and the behavior was recorded for the next 10 min . At the end of this period, the object was removed from the box. For the analysis of this test with ANY-maze™ Video Tracking System, the box was delimited in imaginary zones: - 5-cm zone: area contained within a 5-cm radius around the ball. - 10 cm zone: area contained in a radius of 10 centimetres around the ball. - Wall: if animals were physically located against the walls of the box. - Other: area contained between the 10 centimetre zone and the Wall zone.

DATA RECORDS

All time series from this study are stored in figshare as text files (.txt) or excel files.  Data from each test and each individual is stored as a separate file as detailed in Table 7.  Quails were identified by their Batch #, their Box # and treatment. All information has been provided in the file name as "Test_Batch#_Box#_Treatment" (Table 7). Specifically, Batch # corresponds to the experimental group the animals were tested in, considering that within each batch a pair of females or male belonging to each treatment was tested. The Box # indicates the number of the home-box animals were housed in. The Treatment specifies whether the birds were of control, patch or backpack treatments. In tests where 2 females were tested simultaneously, the data of each is presented in separate columns. 

Within each file, the column Time (s) is present, indicating  the time expressed in seconds in which measurements were taken. Other columns with Behavior indicate the behavior being performed at a given time point recorded using the acronyms stated accordingly in Tables 1-6. vi). In the case of male accelerometer recording files, ax, ay and az, provide acceleration recordings at each time point in the 3 axes (i.e., x, y and z).