The Novel Concept of “Behavioural Instability” and Its Potential Applications

Abstract

Abstract:The concept of developmental instability (DI) is a well-known indicator of environmental and genetic stress and is often investigated using various indices such as fluctuating asymmetry, directional asymmetry, antisymmetry and phenotypic variance. Investigations dealing with DI are using morphometric traits. The aim of this investigation is to present the novel concept of behavioural instability in which the trait measured is a behavioural trait. We apply the conventional indices used for the estimation of developmental instability on directional movement-clockwise (CW) and counter-clockwise (CCW) movement of 19 highly inbred lines of Drosophila melanogaster tested in a circular arena. We show that it is possible to quantify behavioural instability using the indices traditionally used to investigate DI. Results revealed several significant differences among lines, depending on the index utilized. The perspectives of utilizing the concept in biological research such as toxicology, evolutionary and stress biology are discussed.

Genetic Signatures of Drug Response Variability inDrosophila melanogaster

“…The first step that we took to investigate the genetic signature of response to treatment was to assess the effect of MPH on a common behavioral trait, locomotor activity, and on gene expression in a WT mass population. We chose to investigate locomotor activity because: (1) altered activity patterns are a common characteristic of ADHD (American Psychiatric Association 2013; Faraone et al 2015); (2) administered MPH has known behavioral effects on locomotor activity in animal models such as D. melanogaster (van Swinderen and Flores 2006;van der Voet et al 2015), rats (Choi et al 2014;Dafny 2015), mice (Carmack et al 2014), and zebrafish (Nishimura et al 2015;Endres et al 2017); and (3) locomotor activity is quantifiable and well suited for high-throughput studies, and, in particular, video tracking assays have been successfully used previously to study abnormal behaviors in D. melanogaster (Pertoldi et al 2016;Rohde et al 2016bRohde et al , 2018. Jordan et al (2007) and Harbison et al (2013) also used inbred Drosophila lines (including the DGRP) to investigate the genetic architecture of behavioral traits, including sleep patterns and the startle response.…”

Evolutionary Game Research on Symmetry of Workers’ Behavior in Coal Mine Enterprises

“…Therefore, the average expected benefits of safety managers' inspection and non-inspection are shown in Equation (11).…”

“…Based on the definition of unsafe behavior, behavioral symmetry [10] and behavioral stability [11] were studied. In the construction industry, safety behaviors are studied from the aspects of safety cognition and safety climate.…”

Using Behavioral Instability to Investigate Behavioral Reaction Norms in Captive Animals: Theoretical Implications and Future Perspectives

“…Different suggestions have been made to improve the traditional non-standardized methods using ethograms and observations of different time intervals, by using more quantitative and systematic methods. Pertoldi et al [19] introduced the concept of behavioral instability based on the concept of developmental instability. Behavioral instability was introduced as a method of studying the symmetry of behavior, by observing bilateral behavioral traits, for example, how many times an individual looks to the left, versus the right or up and down.…”

“…BSYM is the behavioral instability of symmetry, meaning the deviation from a symmetric distribution for the studied behavior; BVAR is the variance of residuals for the studied behavior, where a higher variance indicates a smaller capacity for anticipating a behavior when stressors are present [19]. The concept of behavioral instability could, as proposed by Bech-Hansen et al [19], also be applied to measure the effect of environmental stress on behavioral data other than bilateral data, as it can be used to measure the effect of environmental stress. Therefore, whether behavioral instability can be used as a new, quantitative way of studying behavior and behavioral responses should be investigated.…”