Jaguar movement behavior: using trajectories and association rule mining algorithms to unveil behavioral states and social interactions

Pattern Mining-Based Pig Behavior Analysis for Health and Welfare Monitoring

The increasing popularity of pigs has prompted farmers to increase pig production to meet the growing demand. However, while the number of pigs is increasing, that of farm workers has been declining, making it challenging to perform various farm tasks, the most important among them being managing the pigs' health and welfare. This study proposes a pattern mining-based pig behavior analysis system to provide visualized information and behavioral patterns, assisting farmers in effectively monitoring and assessing pigs' health and welfare. The system consists of four modules: (1) data acquisition module for collecting pigs video; (2) detection and tracking module for localizing and uniquely identifying pigs, using tracking information to crop pig images; (3) pig behavior recognition module for recognizing pig behaviors from sequences of cropped images; and (4) pig behavior analysis module for providing visualized information and behavioral patterns to effectively help farmers understand and manage pigs. In the second module, we utilize ByteTrack, which comprises YOLOx as the detector and the BYTE algorithm as the tracker, while MnasNet and LSTM serve as appearance features and temporal information extractors in the third module. The experimental results show that the system achieved a multi-object tracking accuracy of 0.971 for tracking and an F1 score of 0.931 for behavior recognition, while also highlighting the effectiveness of visualization and pattern mining in helping farmers comprehend and manage pigs' health and welfare.

Smoothing splines of apex predator movement: Functional modeling strategies for exploring animal behavior and social interactions

The collection of animal position data via GPS tracking devices has increased in quality and usage in recent years. Animal position and movement, although measured discretely, follows the same principles of kinematic motion, and as such, the process is inherently continuous and differentiable. I demonstrate the functionality and visual elegance of smoothing spline models. I discuss the challenges and benefits of implementing such an approach, and I provide an analysis of movement and social interaction of seven jaguars inhabiting the Taiamã Ecological Station, Pantanal, Brazil, a region with the highest known density of jaguars. In the analysis, I derive measures for pairwise distance, cooccurrence, and spatiotemporal association between jaguars, borrowing ideas from density estimation and information theory. These measures are feasible as a result of spline model estimation, and they provide a critical tool for a deeper investigation of cooccurrence duration, frequency, and localized spatio-temporal relationships between animals. In this work, I characterize a variety of interactive relationships between pairs of jaguars, and I particularly emphasize the relationships in movement of two male-female and two male-male jaguar pairs exhibiting highly associative relationships.

Cryptorchidism in free-living jaguar (Panthera onca): first case report

Cryptorchidism is a genital alteration wherein one or both testicles fail to descend into the scrotum and has multifactorial causes. A free-range adult male was captured twice in the Pantanal of Nhecolândia to put a GPS collar and semen collection. Pharmacological semen collection, andrological examination and semen analysis were performed. At the first capture and during the andrological examination only the left testis was found, and the male qualified as cryptorchid. The penis had no penile spines at either procedure. The semen volume obtained at first and second capture was 435 and 160 μL, respectively, with a concentration of 618 and 100 x 10⁶ sperm/mL, progressive motility of ~ 5% and ~ 1% and total morphological sperm abnormalities of 74% and 86%. The male was monitored by a GPS collar, but the signal was lost, making it difficult to re-captures and perform new seminal and ultrasound evaluations to discard monorchidism - exceedingly rare in felids. Genetic studies to assess the individual's homozygosity are necessary to verify whether cryptorchidism in this individual has a genetic factor.