Scaling movement behavior from microscopic rules to macroscopic habitat preference

The Russell lab project will be an extension of the previous year's project that examined the movement of pill-bugs in an experimental arena. This year students will examine the movement tracks directly, to see if we can understand movement on simple landscapes and use this knowledge to explain 'habitat' preference on complex landscapes. Students will conduct two kinds of experiment. The first will use a small, plain (but bounded) arena, and track pill-bug (x,y) locations at high spatial resolution by real-time video tracking. Next, the obtained data on successive movement segments will be used to try and develop a mechanistic model of pill-bug movement behavior, as well as a model for how it varies across the arena (for example, what are the rules when a boundary is encountered?). We will then see if those rules work in a more complex environment (connected arenas). This will help to answer the following question: do the 'micro' rules, when simulated, accurately predict 'macro' behavior such as the rate of movement between connected arenas?

The second experiment will involve altering the floor of the simple area (e.g., dry or moist), and/or the general conditions (lighting), and observing whether one can detect differences in 'micro' behavior produced by these changing conditions. A possible follow-up experiment is to try creating a patterned floor to the arena, and examine whether one can detect what kind of substrate a bug is on, and whether it prefers one kind of substrate to another, by examining its movement track alone.


UBM students Joe Jiang and Kruti Shah in the laboratory of Dr Gareth Russell:


This Program is supported by the NSF grant award DMS-0926232
Please contact Victor Matveev for further information.