Neuro-ethology and sensory neuroscience underlying animal behavior and communication
My research interests lie at the intersection of animal behavior and sensory perception. My long term dream and research goal would be to gain more insight on the meaning of cephalopods and other fascinating animals (fishes, frogs, bees and butterfly) communication displays and behaviors and their underlying sensory perceptual mechanisms.
During my PhD I deciphered a new communication display in the common cuttlefish and the dwarf cuttlefish : the four arm wave signs. The aim of my project was to demonstrate that those body gestures signs may be communication signals perceived through vision and mechanoreception.
During my ongoing post-doc at the Sheets Lab, I will have the wonderful opportunity to conduct behavioral experiments in an other type of fascinating animal: Danionella Dracula, cousin of the zebrafish, that vocalizes !
I am also interested in understanding the sensory computations underlying communication and other behavioral mechanism, at the cellular and molecular level. I am focusing on multimodal perception, integration of vision, hearing and mechanoreception using cross displinary techniques : behavior, computational tools, histology, electrophysiology and calcium imaging.
My current post-doc project gathers all my interest by consisting in characterizing the efferent system (the cholinergic synapse) of the lateral line in zebrafish at the cellular, molecular and behavioral level. I also have the chance to work on assessing an other type of fascinating behavior in zebrafish- rheotaxis– with a behavioral set up and computational tools developed at the Sheets Lab. Finally, I will work on social behavior in the vocalizing Danionela Dracula at the behavioral, cellular and molecular level.
Finally, I am deeply concerned about animal health and well being and would like to help in the development of powerful non invasive behavioral experiment and computational ethology tools with AI for refinement. I am currently designing a cuttlefish robot prototype to interact with cuttlefish.
Cuttlefish communication with arm wave signs
We documented four different arm wave signs: Up, Side, Roll, Crown that have their own very specific pattern. We aimed to demonstrate with non-invasive behavioral experiments We conducted two experiments consisting in playing back the signs to the cuttlefish through vision and mechanoreception.that cuttlefish may communicate visually and through vibrations with those arm wave signs.
You can click on this video for a 2-min presentation of our project (cuttlefish waving guarantee!)
“The visual experiment” : We presented movies of cuttlefish doing arm waves in sequences in two version : a normal version and a flipped version. We demonstrated that cuttlefish respond to the normal version with significantly more arm wave signs.
“The playback experiment” : We recorded traces of arm wave vibrations with an hydrophone and a speaker and played them back to the cuttlefish. The cuttlefish wave back at the vibratory display of their own sign.
Those two behavioral experiment give a first proof of concept that cuttlefish could communicate multimodally (through vision and vibration) with the arm wave signs.
Machine learning to investigate dynamic skin patterning
State dependent dynamics of cuttlefish mantle activity -JEB June 2024
We also developed a new method to analyze skin patterning dynamics in a non-invasive ways. We used as proxy the unique ability of the cuttlefish to do dynamic skin patterning for camouflage and communication. We developed a custom machine learning tracking algorithm on freely behaving cuttlefish, during the eating behavior. We developed state-of the art signal processing statistical analysis on the PCA aligned stacks of the skin patterns to recover their time series dynamics (frequency of expression of a particular skin pattern). Our paper is available here : https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/227/14/jeb247457/361220/State-dependent-dynamics-of-cuttlefish-mantle
Sophie Cohen-Bodénès 