Deciphering choreographies of elaborate courtship displays

In our paper “Deciphering choreographies of elaborate courtship displays of golden-collared manakins using markerless motion capture” published in Ethology (2021), we describe a method to record elaborate courtship dances recorded in the 3 dimensional space. Not only did we take all recordings in the field, also the analysis of this data set was a new challenge. We developed a way to describe the movements of golden-collared manakins while attracting their mates and untangled new parameters for studying behavioural differences between individuals.

Animation from the tracked 3D positions of a display of one of our males performing his jumps.

If you are interested to learn more about 3D motion capture and automated tracking software check out our publication here.

A) The graph shows the reconstructed movements of a whole display of a male manakin. Red dots are resting frames and the grey dots where the bird is moving. B) The drawing gives information how we fitted a parabola to the trajectories of the jumps and all the parameters we could derive from it for further analysis.

Janisch J., Perinot E., Fusani L., Quigley C. (2021). Deciphering choreographies of elaborate courtship displays of golden‐collared manakins using markerless motion capture. Ethology https://doi.org/10.1111/eth.13161

If you would like to find out more about the authors check out their profiles:

Judith Janisch

Elisa Perinot

Leonida Fusani

Cliodhna Quigley

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