Connor White Thesis Defense (George Lauder, Advisor)

Title: From the lab to the field: studying fish locomotor dynamics using animal-borne dataloggers

Abstract: Understanding how animals move is essential to understanding where and why animals move. However, most current studies of animal biomechanics are focused on recording videos of stereotyped behaviors in controlled laboratory conditions. Alternatively, we can directly measure the body movement of animals using small acceleration, angular velocity, and magnetic field dataloggers. This method allows us to tag large animals and collect spatio-temporally unbiased estimates of their kinematics in both the lab and wild. In my dissertation I employ this approach, and I identify its problems, solutions, and benefits.

In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that individual dataloggers temporally drift apart from each other at a rate that meaningfully disrupts their use for kinematics. I show that these errors are quantifiable in both the lab and field and how to correct them. In Chapter 2, I deploy multiple dataloggers on a soft robotic system and three diverse species of fish and show generated kinematic metrics during both routine and high performance swimming and evaluate these metrics against traditional video data. In Chapters 3 and 4, I develop a novel multitag package and deploy it on smooth dogfish in the wild. In Chapter 3, I use this dataset to test a previous hypothesis that the anterior and posterior body regions of sharks oscillate at different frequencies. I observed no evidence of different oscillation frequencies and suggest these previous observations are due to estimation errors from short monitoring periods. In Chapter 4, I recreate the kinematics of sharks in the wild. I measure how different body parts move and demonstrate how movement along the body varies with tailbeat frequency during routine swimming. Additionally, I document turning behavior and show how these “unsteady” behaviors are a significant part of a wild animal’s behavior. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that important biomechanical metrics can be calculated in situ from multiple data loggers attached to animals in the field, and opens the door for documentation of new behaviors, in new species.

Committee: George Lauder (Advisor), Andrew Biewener, Andrew Davies, Stephanie Pierce (Chair)