Behavioral Biomarkers for Animal Health: A Case Study Using Animal-Attached Technology on Loggerhead Turtles

Arkwright, Alexandra C.; Archibald, E. S.; Fahlman, Andreas; Holton, Mark D.; Crespo-Picazo, José Luís; Cabedo, Vicente M.; Duarte, Carlos M.; Scott, Rebecca; Webb, Sophie; Gunner, Richard; Wilson, Rory P.

doi:10.3389/fevo.2019.00504

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 102 publications

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“…For this experiment, we selected five turtles admitted to the ARCA between December 2019 and May 2020 that each hosted at least 10 C. testudinaria . Upon admission to ARCA, the turtles were suffering from decompression sickness and were thus treated and monitored for up to 18 weeks before being released back into the wild (for details on veterinary care, see [ 39 ]). Sea turtles were housed in circular tanks, ranging from 2 to 6 m in diameter with a water depth of 0.95 m and maintained at a water temperature of approximately 24°C.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five hundred million years to mobility: directed locomotion and its ecological function in a turtle barnacle

et al. 2021

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Movement is a fundamental characteristic of life, yet some invertebrate taxa, such as barnacles, permanently affix to a substratum as adults. Adult barnacles became ‘sessile’ over 500 Ma; however, we confirm that the epizoic sea turtle barnacle, Chelonibia testudinaria , has evolved the capacity for self-directed locomotion as adults. We also assess how these movements are affected by water currents and the distance between conspecifics. Finally, we microscopically examine the barnacle cement. Chelonibia testudinaria moved distances up to 78.6 mm yr −1 on loggerhead and green sea turtle hosts. Movements on live hosts and on acrylic panels occasionally involved abrupt course alterations of up to 90°. Our findings showed that barnacles tended to move directly against water flow and independent of nearby conspecifics. This suggests that these movements are not passively driven by external forces and instead are behaviourally directed. In addition, it indicates that these movements function primarily to facilitate feeding, not reproduction. While the mechanism enabling movement remained elusive, we observed that trails of cement bore signs of multi-layered, episodic secretion. We speculate that proximal causes of movement involve one or a combination of rapid shell growth, cement secretion coordinated with basal membrane lifting, and directed contraction of basal perimeter muscles.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five hundred million years to mobility: directed locomotion and its ecological function in a turtle barnacle

et al. 2021

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“…However, in wildlife disease ecology, attempts to remotely detect disease onset have been limited because of the challenge of working with free-living animals. Nevertheless, it has been shown that accelerometers have wide potential to detect sickness behaviour across different animal classes, including insects [ 18 ], reptiles [ 42 ], and large mammals [ 17 ]. Similarly, our results support the notion that accelerometer sensors can detect health issues in captive and free ranging animals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accelerometer-based detection of African swine fever infection in wild boar

Morelle,

Barasona,

Bosch

et al. 2023

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Infectious wildlife diseases that circulate at the interface with domestic animals pose significant threats worldwide and require early detection and warning. Although animal tracking technologies are used to discern behavioural changes, they are rarely used to monitor wildlife diseases. Common disease-induced behavioural changes include reduced activity and lethargy (‘sickness behaviour’). Here, we investigated whether accelerometer sensors could detect the onset of African swine fever (ASF), a viral infection that induces high mortality in suids for which no vaccine is currently available. Taking advantage of an experiment designed to test an oral ASF vaccine, we equipped 12 wild boars with an accelerometer tag and quantified how ASF affects their activity pattern and behavioural fingerprint, using overall dynamic body acceleration. Wild boars showed a daily reduction in activity of 10–20% from the healthy to the viremia phase. Using change point statistics and comparing healthy individuals living in semi-free and free-ranging conditions, we show how the onset of disease-induced sickness can be detected and how such early detection could work in natural settings. Timely detection of infection in animals is crucial for disease surveillance and control, and accelerometer technology on sentinel animals provides a viable complementary tool to existing disease management approaches.

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“…Pattern recognition is an important area in the emergence of intelligent systems the classification of patterns from sensory information into categories is necessary to achieve a goal [13]. For example, recent years have seen the development of new animal-attached devices called Biologgers which are used to monitor the environment, track locations and quantify the behaviour of certain species [1]. These devices sometimes use transmission technologies such as Very High Frequency (VHF), acoustic telemetry or, more recently, orbiting satellites to monitor certain species over a long period.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrate-and-Fire Neurons for Low-Powered Pattern Recognition

Bacho¹,

Chu²

2021

Preprint

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Embedded systems acquire information about the real world from sensors and process it to make decisions and/or for transmission. In some situations, the relationship between the data and the decision is complex and/or the amount of data to transmit is large (e.g. in biologgers). Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can efficiently detect patterns in the input data which makes them suitable for decision making or compression of information for data transmission. However, ANNs require a substantial amount of energy which reduces the lifetime of batterypowered devices. Therefore, the use of Spiking Neural Networks can improve such systems by providing a way to efficiently process sensory data without being too energy-consuming. In this work, we introduce a low-powered neuron model called Integrate-and-Fire which exploits the charge and discharge properties of the capacitor. Using parallel and series RC circuits, we developed a trainable neuron model that can be expressed in a recurrent form. Finally, we trained its simulation with an artificially generated dataset of dog postures and implemented it as hardware that showed promising energetic properties.

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Behavioral Biomarkers for Animal Health: A Case Study Using Animal-Attached Technology on Loggerhead Turtles

Cited by 8 publications

References 102 publications

Five hundred million years to mobility: directed locomotion and its ecological function in a turtle barnacle

Five hundred million years to mobility: directed locomotion and its ecological function in a turtle barnacle

Accelerometer-based detection of African swine fever infection in wild boar

Integrate-and-Fire Neurons for Low-Powered Pattern Recognition

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