The article shares an open access research tool for studying animal communication that was developed as part of Evora’s Elon Lumen project. The work was done by Evora, collaborators from the University of Missouri and Curtin University and Hamel. The article appears in a special issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata.
Elon alumna Alana Evora ’23 and Jen Hamel, associate professor in the Department of Biology, have co-authored an article in a special issue of the journal Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata that shares an open access version of a computing tool for research on animal communication. This research was conducted at Elon University as part of Evora’s Lumen Project and Honor’s thesis.
The article, “VibePy: an open-source tool for conducting high-fidelity vibrational playback experiments,” was co-authored by Evora (first author), Rex Cocroft, Shyam Madhusudhan and Hamel. VibePy is a free software solution to a common challenge encountered by researchers who study vibrational communication.
Vibrational communication, in which an animal communicates by shaking or otherwise imparting waves into a substrate, is used by animals ranging from insects to elephants, including an estimated ~200,000 insect species. Researchers often test hypotheses about vibrational communication by using a type of study called a playback experiment. In such experiments, the signals of a focal species are recorded and played to other individuals with the aim of observing their responses to the signals.
A common challenge of vibrational playback experiments is that the substrate through which the signal is played, as well as the hardware used to play the signals, distort the signals via unwanted frequency filtering. An additional challenge is that researchers need to calibrate the amplitude or “loudness” of the signals being played, and because propagation of waves through solid substrates is difficult to predict. Therefore, such calibration needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. A software solution that compensates for unwanted frequency filtering and calibrates playback amplitude is available, but it requires a proprietary software license and therefore imposes a cost barrier to researchers.
Research on vibrational communication, or biotremology, is occurring in a diverse and growing community, and Evora and Hamel saw the need for an open-source software solution that could accomplish the same functions as the existing script. They collaborated with Rex Cocroft, a vibrational communication researcher at the University of Missouri who developed the original script, and Shyam Madhusudhana, an animal acoustics researcher with extensive experience developing open-source software for research applications. The tool, VibePy, measures and compensates for undesired filtering and calibrates playback amplitude, and it has been developed using the open-source, cross-platform language Python.
VibePy is available free for download online (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10059888). The article is part of a themed special journal issue on biotremology. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata is a peer-reviewed, international journal published by Wiley, and its primary focus is to publish research in experimental biology and the ecology of insects and terrestrial arthropods. The journal article is being published via open access license, made possible by a publishing agreement between Elon University and Wiley.
Evora is currently a research technician in the lab of Dr. Arnaldo Carreira-Rosario at Duke University, where she studies early brain development using fruit flies as an experimental system. She became interested in the forces that give rise to different animal behaviors while studying vibrational communication in insects at Elon. Insect communication and the development of resources to increase research accessibility are active areas of study in Hamel’s research group.