Automated pulse discrimination of two freely-swimming weakly electric fish and analysis of their electrical behavior during a dominance contest
Rafael Tuma Guariento, Thiago Schiavo Mosqueiro, Paulo Matias,, Vinicius Burani Cesarino, Lirio Onofre Baptista de Almeida, Jan Frans Willem, Slaets, Leonardo Paulo Maia, Reynaldo Daniel Pinto

TL;DR
This study developed an optimized automated software to discriminate electric pulses from two freely-swimming weakly electric fish, enabling detailed analysis of their electrical behaviors during dominance contests and revealing behavioral signatures like chirps and offs.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel, optimized method for automatically identifying pulse emitters in freely interacting electric fish, facilitating detailed behavioral analysis.
Findings
Chirps are indicators of submission during contests.
Submissive fish produce more offs, signaling submission cues.
Pulse rate changes are observed mainly in submissive fish after dominance is established.
Abstract
Electric fishes modulate their electric organ discharges with a remarkable variability. Some patterns can be easily identified, such as pulse rate changes, offs and chirps, which are often associated with important behavioral contexts, including aggression, hiding and mating. However, these behaviors are only observed when at least two fish are freely interacting. Although their electrical pulses can be easily recorded by non-invasive techniques, discriminating the emitter of each pulse is challenging when physically similar fish are allowed to freely move and interact. Here we optimized a custom-made software recently designed to identify the emitter of pulses by using automated chirp detection, adaptive threshold for pulse detection and slightly changing how the recorded signals are integrated. With these optimizations, we performed a quantitative analysis of the statistical changes…
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