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.