ABS 2013 Part 1

It's been a productive, though at times frustrating, first 24 hours at the 2013 Animal Behavior Society meeting.  I met last night with one of my long time behavior ontology collaborators.  We are planning two NBO focussed events next year.  The second one will definitely be during the break between ISBE and ABS next summer.  The first, which will be more technically focussed will likely be around the time of the next Phenotype RCN summit though it might be at a different time or venue.

Before I arrived yesterday, they held a public outreach day and apparently the human habituated wolves they brought onto the U Colorado campus were a big hit.  Continuing the canine theme this morning, the plenary was on 'Why we love dogs' - discussing various behaviors dogs and their owners use to maintain their bonds.  After the Plenary and coffee (sort of, only decaf was left by the time I got through the line), I spent most of the morning in the predation session.  The primary talks of interest to me was one on ontogeny of newly hatched spiderlings, and one on resource patch decision making by slime molds.  The spider study (on a central american Pholcid species it turns out) demonstrated that the newly hatched spiderlings could respond appropriately with differing levels of attack intensity to differing prey (Drosophila vs. a local ant species), and that this flexibility was not the result of learning from previous experience (Escalante).  The slime mold talk (Reid) mentioned previous work that showed slime mold could find the minimum distance through a maze between two food sources through a type of 'distributed processing.'   Another talk of interest described a study of chunking and the limits of memory used by caching squirrels (Jacobs).  The ABS tweeters have settled on #2013ABS as several other groups have been using ABS2013.

My favorite tweet of the morning was certainly this one:

Animal behavior studies are rarely comparative. Need to gather data, store and make it available. Phylogenies are needed too! #2013ABS
— Daniel Caetano (@darkymoss) July 29, 2013

The phylogenies have gotten better and more comprehensive, but the gathering and sharing of comparative data still has a long way to go.

AAS 2013

Here's a belated report from the 2013 American Arachnological Society meeting last week.  While I was there I tweeted a couple of times and @nsandlin tweeted about nearly all the talks.  Time to get this off my plate before Animal Behavior next week.

I found several talks quite memorable, including Eileen Hebets talk that seems to represent a start at integrating all the multi-modal signaling data for Schizocosa she's accumulated over the past 15-20 years.  I also liked Igni Agnarsson's talk on the diversity of Malagasy Anelosimus - lots of related species in close proximity, and unlike their North American sister clade, all remain sub-social.

Another memorable talk, if for more personal reasons, was Angela DiDomenico's (student of Marshal Hedin) systematic work with the Opilione genus Sitalcina.  Turns out there is likely an undescribed species in a draw only a couple of miles from where I attended Junior High School in Palos Verdes.  I'm not really surprised - the ecology of Palos Verdes has been known to include endemics for a while now (remember the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly?).  Hopefully this (not so traditionally charismatic) arachnid will have a better future than the PV Blue butterfly.

I knew that George Uetz had done a lot with the Schizocosa system, but the shear number of Schizocosa talks, especially during the second Monday morning session, was a bit of a shock.  S. ocreata really is attaining model organism status.

Apart from the talks, I got to catch up with people I knew in the Tucson Maddison lab, particularly Greta Binford, who indicated that several spider genomes are either done or nearing completion.   Having the genome sequenced is not the same as the level of annotation we have in vertebrate model organisms, but it is a step towards the day we could do a Phenoscape like project for spiders.

I also briefly chatted with Eileen and with Jonathan Coddington, who I got to know a bit from some phenotype ontology activities prior to the launch of the RCN.

The meeting also offered several opportunities to add to my literature collection, and I took advantage of the honor system reprint table as well as a couple of items in the silent auction.

Arachnolingua

At last year's iEvoBio I gave a lightning talk about Arachnolingua, an informatics project for spider behavior.  I've been plugging away at it, but not saying much.  Not ready for a release yet, but I've decided to try blogging my progress on it.  I've also decided to do that in a separate blog, keeping this one for items of more general interest (e.g., trip reports, more general musings).  So, if you have any interest in semantic representation of spider behavior, take a peak at An Arachnolingua Blog.

This summer

After going to Evolution and iEvoBio for the past three years, it's time for a change. I'll be heading back to the Animal Behavior Society meeting this summer (representing myself this time), and, for the first time in 11 years, I'll be attending the American Arachnological Society meeting.  I'm not turning my back on Evolution or the interesting community developing in Evolutionary Informatics - I expect to be back in the Triangle for the Evolution Meetings next year.

Meanwhile, I'll hope to have some interesting reports, both here and on twitter (@pmidford) and looking forward to meeting old and new friends.

We held a workshop...

Last month George Gkoutos and I ran a behavior ontologies workshop in association with the Phenotype Ontologies RCN.  We posted a detailed report here.  This meeting was an opportunity for Animal Behaviorists (I invited Anne Clark, Sue Margulis, and Cyndy Parr who were at the 2003-2004 Cornell workshops that developed ABO) with some of the top ontologists from the OBO community.  My only regret was that we didn't have enough space to invite a broader range of behavioral interests.

ABS 2012 - It's different this time

I've finally made it back to full attend an ABS meeting for the first time in five years (I last presented at the 2007ABS in Vermont).  I'm here in a different role this time though, not as a postdoc or an ontology contractor.  I'm attending talks for the first couple of days, then representing the Dryad repository at an exhibitor's table, which will extend into the first days of the following HBES meeting.

I haven't stopped doing ontologies or thinking about spider behavior (I caught talks on Black Widow sibling cannibalism and jumping spider vision this morning - the later talk included some courtship clips that looked very familiar).  And although I've stopped work on OWLWatcher, I have a more focussed project related to spider behavior and one more in keeping with NESCent's focus on synthesis.  More about that later.

For the moment, I will spend the time catching up with behavior people, making new contacts, and enjoying some talks.  You can catch me on twitter at @pmidford, or follow the tag #abshbes2012.

PDAP and OwlWatcher

I put up a new version of the PDAP:PDTREE Mesquite package last night. Nothing big in this one, mostly a couple of messages regarding the resolution of polytomies (it's arbitrary so the details of individual contrasts will differ). The most important change is that PDAP now supports Mesquite's new install system so you should no long need to manually download archives and drag folders of class files around. It also gives you control of where the PDAP examples (misc PDI files and the guided tour wind up). Previously you were told where to put the class files, but I'd imagine the examples would languish in the archive fold until forgotten or deleted.

I have a request pending that might yield another PDAP release in the next week or so.

OwlWatcher is making progress. The player is more or less done - there are two small issues that I know of (specifically related to audio buffering and 'rocking' single frames back and forth), but happily I can go back to more interesting things such as finishing the integration with version 3 of the OWLAPI. When the release finally comes, it will be a two step process, first installing Xuggler, followed by OwlWatcher itself. If there are other java API's for video that you would like to see supported in OwlWatcher, feel free to request in the comments. I don't have much time to devote to OwlWatcher these days, but now that I've gone through the process of building a player up from a decoder library, it should be easier the second time (Quicktime provided a player that was adequate, but I think this solution will be more flexible as OwlWatcher continues to develop).