Jerboa Jump, But Can a Camera Catch it? Machine Vision for Behavioral Labeling in Captive Jerboa

Jerboas (family Dipodidae) present a unique model to study biomechanics, as they are obligately bipedal hopping rodents whose ricochetal escape responses involve unpredictable three-dimensional trajectories. However, because little is known regarding the natural history, activity budgets, and behaviors of jerboas, it is unclear whether and how captivity affects their locomotor performance. For example, how do jerboas maintain their rapid acceleration ability when their movement is restricted in captivity? Previous work has shown that immobilization quickly alters the fiber type of muscles. We have begun to address this question by building an activity budget for captive jerboas. We first built an ethogram of singly-housed captive adult lesser Egyptian jerboas (Jaculus jaculus; N=2 age-matched males) using a machine vision classifier, DeepAction, to automatically classify behaviors. Ethogram states identified include grooming/eating/foraging, jumping, locomotion, wall interactions, dust bath interaction, rolling, sedentary, and obstructed behaviors with an overall, combined accuracy of 85.9%. In particular, we found that jerboas spend approximately 5-20% of their active time jumping vertically, which has been identified in historical descriptions of free-living jerboas and may prevent muscular atrophy and maintain predator evasion ability. This type of automated ethogram assessment might also be used to  identify repetitive behaviors with stereotypic potential, and aid in the evaluation of novel enrichments as they pertain to animal welfare.

@inproceedings{boulanger2024jerboa,
  title={Jerboa Jump, But Can a Camera Catch it? Machine Vision for Behavioral Labeling in Captive Jerboa},
  author={Boulanger, Matthew and Moore, Talia and Miyarmae, Juri and Hish, Gerry},
  booktitle={INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY},
  volume={64},
  pages={S56--S57},
  year={2024},
  organization={OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC JOURNALS DEPT, 2001 EVANS RD, CARY, NC 27513 USA}
}