Hi Everyone,
I am working on analyzing a hunting sequences from different animals. I have written down each behaviour per second and have them as categorical data in order of appearance.
An example would be:
Animal__|__Time(s)__|__Behavior
ID1______|_____1_____|____Run
ID1______|_____2_____|____Jump
ID1______|_____3_____|____Run
I would like to see if the variety of behaviours is significantly different among the different animals, if the number of specific behaviours are significantly different between the animals and last, if there are significant differences between the behaviours displayed at the beginning of the hunting sequence, compare to the end, for each animal.
I am having troubles selecting the proper statistical analysis and would love to hear your suggestions.
Thank you so much for your help!!
A part of an ethogram is work towards a fuller ethogram. You would always be seeing things as behavior PATTERNS, and patterns of patterns, etc. That is biology IN BEHAVIOR [patterns] : behaviors per se, itself. What could allow for better foundations or the growth of knowledge? (I'd say forget the absolute timing OR misinterpret "cstegorical".) My 2 cents.
Thank you for the nice answers, but I need to compare the frequencies of the different behaviours among the different animals, and in those examples I do not see that kind on analysis. Also, I am not trying to find patterns.
Thank you for your help though :)
Dear Sara Torres Ortiz
Fine. But don't YOU define "kinds of behaviors" ; always fully find behavior patterns from each of the subjects and species. Classical ethology never defined anything; but found many things (patterns, etc.) and sufficient things to make related behaviors/environmental circumstances DISTINCT (species-typical or species-specific).
Dear Sara,
Here is an example for frequency, duration and latency data:Article When facing an unfamiliar person, pet dogs present social re...
In my opinion what you may be looking for is better described by duration data.
Hi, Sara. As far as I can understand, you have two levels of analysis:
Level 1: INTRASPECIFIC
- I think that ethograms are useful for seeing the behavioral sequence of each species in a descriptive way. You can do that in addition to the stats.
- You also want to compare the behaviors within the sequence of each animal. The model could be a GLMM or LMM for each behavior:
Response variable: Number of times the behavior occurs (also it could be Duration of the behavior/Appearance of the behavior)
Predictor variable: "moment of the sequence" (you could categorize it as you wish)
+ Random effect (individual) to control the repeated measurements of each individual.
* Caution: If your "moment of the sequence" factor has more than 10 levels, you should consider working with time series.
Level 2: INTERSPECIFIC
- Here I have more doubts, your response variable would be the average frequency of the behaviors during the whole sequence?
You could run a model like:
Response variable: frequency of occurrence
Predictor variables: "type of behavior" (categorical) + "animal species"
* I think you should include the interaction between type of behavior and species to assess just how often the frequency varies overall for both factors.
These are just suggestions and without understanding much about the topic, I hope it's useful for you
Best regards,
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1090&context=usgsnpwrc
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