Female mice ultrasonically interact with males during courtship displays

Neunuebel, Joshua P.; Taylor, Adam L.; Arthur, Ben J.; Egnor, SE Roian

doi:10.7554/elife.06203

Cited by 183 publications

(281 citation statements)

References 84 publications

(112 reference statements)

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“…We also recommend to always use introduced mice from the same strain when testing mice from a mutant strain and to analyze the data as a pair of mice vocalizing. One recent study promotes the use of triangulation to localize the emitter 31 . In this study, females were found to also emit ultrasonic vocalizations during encounters with a male.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recording Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalizations to Evaluate Social Communication

Ferhat

Torquet

Sourd

et al. 2016

JoVE

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Mice emit ultrasonic vocalizations in different contexts throughout development and in adulthood. These vocal signals are now currently used as proxies for modeling the genetic bases of vocal communication deficits. Characterizing the vocal behavior of mouse models carrying mutations in genes associated with neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorders will help to understand the mechanisms leading to social communication deficits. We provide here protocols to reliably elicit ultrasonic vocalizations in pups and in adult mice. This standardization will help reduce inter-study variability due to the experimental settings. Pup isolation calls are recorded throughout development from individual pups isolated from dam and littermates. In adulthood, vocalizations are recorded during same-sex interactions (without a sexual component) by exposing socially motivated males or females to an unknown same-sex conspecific. We also provide a protocol to record vocalizations from adult males exposed to an estrus female. In this context, there is a sexual component in the interaction. These protocols are established to elicit a large amount of ultrasonic vocalizations in laboratory mice. However, we point out the important inter-individual variability in the vocal behavior of mice, which should be taken into account by recording a minimal number of individuals (at least 12 in each condition). These recordings of ultrasonic vocalizations are used to evaluate the call rate, the vocal repertoire and the acoustic structure of the calls. Data are combined with the analysis of synchronous video recordings to provide a more complete view on social communication in mice. These protocols are used to characterize the vocal communication deficits in mice lacking ProSAP1/Shank2 , a gene associated with autism spectrum disorders. More ultrasonic vocalizations recordings can also be found on the mouseTube database, developed to favor the exchange of such data.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recording Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalizations to Evaluate Social Communication

Ferhat

Torquet

Sourd

et al. 2016

JoVE

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“…The rigorous assignation of calls to specific animals in a group of calling individuals remains a challenge (Janik et al, 2000;Gill et al, 2015;Neunuebel et al, 2015), but a comprehensive recording of subglottal pressure and/or EMG activity together with sound allows an unambiguous interpretation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rats concatenate 22 kHz and 50 kHz calls into a single utterance

Hernández

Sabin

Riede

2017

Journal of Experimental Biology

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Traditionally, the ultrasonic vocal repertoire of rats is differentiated into 22 kHz and 50 kHz calls, two categories that contain multiple different call types. Although both categories have different functions, they are sometimes produced in the same behavioral context. Here, we investigated the peripheral mechanisms that generate sequences of calls from both categories. Male rats, either sexually experienced or naïve, were exposed to an estrous female. The majority of sexually naïve male rats produced 22 kHz and 50 kHz calls on their first encounter with a female. We recorded subglottal pressure and electromyographic activity of laryngeal muscles and found that male rats sometimes concatenate long 22 kHz calls and 50 kHz trill calls into an utterance produced during a single breath. The qualitatively different laryngeal motor patterns for both call types were produced serially during the same breathing cycle. The finding demonstrates flexibility in the laryngeal-respiratory coordination during ultrasonic vocal production, which has not been previously documented physiologically in non-human mammals. Since only naïve males produced the 22 kHz-trills, it is possible that the production is experience dependent.

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“…As with lighting, avoiding reflections of the audio signal is good practice, which can be achieved by careful choice of chamber material (e.g. Neunuebel et al, 2015).…”

Section: Optimizing For High-quality Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1E (Ohayon et al, 2013). To prevent animal-animal occlusions, animals can be restricted to a planar environment by using walls and/or lids they cannot climb (Mersch et al, 2013;Neunuebel et al, 2015;Simon and Dickinson, 2010), thereby removing occlusions due to visually overlapping positions on different surfaces (e.g. one animal on the ceiling and one under it on the floor).…”

Section: Avoiding Occlusionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Machine vision methods for analyzing social interactions

Robie

Seagraves

Egnor

et al. 2017

Journal of Experimental Biology

123

101

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Recent developments in machine vision methods for automatic, quantitative analysis of social behavior have immensely improved both the scale and level of resolution with which we can dissect interactions between members of the same species. In this paper, we review these methods, with a particular focus on how biologists can apply them to their own work. We discuss several components of machine vision-based analyses: methods to record high-quality video for automated analyses, video-based tracking algorithms for estimating the positions of interacting animals, and machine learning methods for recognizing patterns of interactions. These methods are extremely general in their applicability, and we review a subset of successful applications of them to biological questions in several model systems with very different types of social behaviors.

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Female mice ultrasonically interact with males during courtship displays

Cited by 183 publications

References 84 publications

Recording Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalizations to Evaluate Social Communication

Recording Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalizations to Evaluate Social Communication

Rats concatenate 22 kHz and 50 kHz calls into a single utterance

Machine vision methods for analyzing social interactions

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