Hello,
I am conducting some behavioural experiments in which I would like to track the movements of two-spotted spider mites, but EthoVision is a little out of my price range. Does anyone know of any free versions that could be used instead?
Thanks,
Joe
Hi Joe,
Depending on how long you want to track movements and what information you are hoping to acquire from these experiments there may be some free software alternatives you can test out. That is, if you compromise on ease of use and are prepared to do some of the calculations yourself. I have been able to track movements of Tribolium beetles using a simple video recording setup with a high res webcam, then imported the video file into MATLAB and used a tracking script available free from here: http://www.unc.edu/~thedrick/software1.html , then calculate movement traits in Excel from the tracking output.
If you don't have access to MATLAB, there are many different post-recording tracking scripts for videos or image stacks available for use in the free software ImageJ (http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/) such as MTrackJ, MTrack2, Spot Tracker, wrmTrck, MultiTracker etc. which may work for your needs.
Good luck,
Pieter
Hi Joe,
There are several open source solutions for free tracking of animal movements. You can check Bonsai/OPenEphys (http://www.open-ephys.org/bonsai/), or the papers of Jhuang et al., 2010 (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1064) and de Chaumont et al 2012 (https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.1924).
Since there is still interest in this question/topic, here is another recent open source solution to animal movement and behaviour tracking that would be worth exploring. Tracktor: image-based automated tracking of animal movement and behaviour by Vivek Hari Sridhar, Dominique G Roche, Simon Gingins. Manuscript: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/09/412262
Software and manual: https://github.com/vivekhsridhar/tracktor
Joe M. Roberts I hope you got an answer to your question. I am also going to suggest our app at www.behaviorcloud.com
This is an affordable option compared to Noldus, Anymaze, Cleversys, and allows you to access from any device as well as share with colleagues and collaborators.
Traja (https://github.com/justinshenk/traja) is a Python library intended for similar analyses of animal trajectory data, requiring collection of the data.
Just to add a free software to the list. Muheim et al. published a software for Bird tracking, but for sure could also be used for other animals: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofo.12053?casa_token=pmRzF4ca2yYAAAAA%3A6QpwdpxPIH7n9edCeGmJ3ZCGF85PCERGu9ZrVUAsuDjfXTQL3vo7rhNAV1pA20uklLWuPmx-UbHxwuNU
Hey Joe, I'm from the future, did you manage to use any of the tips posted here? I have the same problem and I would like to know if you solved it and with what software
Joe M. Roberts
You can try to see if you can do this tracing with Deeplabcut. If your camera has a good resolution I believe this is possible. You would only need to see how to treat this data later according to your interest. Maybe the DLC already has a tool for that
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