October 2020
A few university lecturers we know have asked us whether we have video material to help them prepare teaching materials for lab practicals that have, due to Covid, been cancelled/might be cancelled. We have not had to visit conferences this year, and we decided to make available some material which we hope will be useful.
Mosquito larvae resonding to a vibrational startle in the Zantiks MWP unit
We have 24 of these 21 seconds videos that show the response of larvae to a vibrational stimulus of 500ms that starts when the red light comes on in the video.
Together with these videos we have a data file with 21 seconds of data around each startle that records the time spent in the upper, middle and lower thirds of the cuvette, and the distance travelled, and the numbers of visits to each zone within the second. All data was automatically recorded live from the Zantiks MWP unit.
Mosquito Learning Outcomes
- To gain understanding of vertical distribution in aquatic organisms
- To gain understanding of the startle response or startle reflex in animals
- To gain understanding of habituation to stimuli (or lack of) and discuss how this may help or hinder ecological processes
- To gain practical experience in coding animal behaviours from video data
- To gain experience in handling large data sets from automatically generated behavioural data
- To compare and contrast manual versus automatically generated behavioural data and understand the pros and cons of both methods
- To understand how to apply appropriate statistical analysis to a dataset
- To understand the importance of generating baseline data on animal behaviours
The data to go with the videos is here
The 24 videos are available here
