Integrating Software Engineering and Sensory Ecology:
Tools for Understanding Animal Orientation

Yakir Gagnon - Lund Vision Group
Visionarium 2025

How do they turn?

  • Do they turn in random directions?
  • How much do they turn?
Elin Dirlik

Elin Dirlik
center
Elin Dirlik
center
Elin Dirlik

Solar elevation

How does it affect the dance?

  • The sun has zero directional information when it's at the zenith
Elin Dirlik

Logit

left right

Elin Dirlik

(show them the widget)

Elin Dirlik

Physical relevance

Elin Dirlik

Bastien Clémot
Bastien Clémot

Bastien Clémot
center
Bastien Clémot

Sky room

  • Group brings back ~400 beetles per trip
  • ~ 3 strudent, 3 PhDs, 2 postdocs = many behavioral experiments

Others

  • Sun moon tables
  • Camera calibrations
  • Autotracker
  • Data analysis pipeline

As a hiring PI

Pros:

  • Broad spectrum of expertise
  • Background lines of investigation
  • Elevate the whole lab

Cons:

  • Costs money
  • No formal/institutional way of paying/motivating for it

As a career choice

Pros:

  • no grant applications, articles to write, teaching
  • build and play with "toys"

Cons:

  • no job security
  • less pay than in the private industry

The end

Thank you for listening

Hi my name is Yakir, I work as a Research Software Engineer at Marie Dacke's lab at Lund University, Sweden. What is a research software engineer? I'm basically like a postdoc that never leaves. I build software and hardware for everyone in the lab, including experimental setups, statistical analysis, visualizations, and more... I'd like to present what a RSE does and why that could be useful for PIs and students, and why you might want to become one.

Dancing behavior. They scan their environment. Using the sun as a directional cue. The dance allows them to pan across the sky and register the direction of the sun relative to the ground. This was recorded by Elin Dirlik

This animation was made by Bestien in blender. He even made the screws...