Thank you Jonny! Nice to see you back on here, I hope all is well.

Thanks! We use an AudioMoth and have really liked the quality/ease of use.

lol…loved the big rat appearance, very topical

Thank you! Some interesting vocalization observations…

bsky.app/profile/ralp...

Thank you!

Thank you! We are hosting someone on sabbatical now, so yes!

Thank you John!

Exactly.

We are piloting V2 of this work and would be excited to brainstorm next directions. Please be in touch if you have comments, questions, or would like to collaborate!

This is probably also a good time to announce that I have parlayed this literal PhD moonlight project into a postdoc at @basisresearch.bsky.social, where I am working on Collaborative Intelligent Systems (biological and artificial) with Emily Mackevicius.

Together, we show that it's possible to make high-resolution behavioral measurements of rats in their natural urban envt and apply modern ML tools for behavior + envt quant. We are working on more methods to map the sensory world and frameworks for inferring cognitive strategies within these worlds.

Finally, we used a wireless ultrasonic mic to record vocalizations. We observed an amazing diversity of calls which have acoustic features that lay outside of the standard distribution reported in the lab. Also, we see interesting usage of the classically negative affect 22 kHz call during foraging.

It's hard to interpret observations like this because in the field we cannot control environmental factors that might be causing movement. Instead, we built 3D reconstructions of the environment using gaussian splatting with the goal of building causal models that can link environment + behavior.

We noticed periods of coordinated collective movement where some, but not all, animals appeared to participate. We implemented multi-animal tracking and a size-estimation model to show that larger rats move faster and are more likely to participate in collective bursts than smaller animals.

Thermal imaging worked great at our sites. High SNR and able to see through vegetation in parks.