With the general goals of better understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of behavioral, anatomical, developmental, and physiological variation, we will use the capacity to adequately record and analyze animal motion for the study of a wide variety of behaviors and functions in vertebrates and invertebrates. By studying different individuals within a single species and different species, motion analysis will be used to define, quantify and compare different behaviors (movements) and determine the relative effectiveness of animals performing tasks such as sprinting locomotion, feeling, and communicating with potential mates. Simultaneous records of motion and muscle activity, will be used to examine the neural control of animal movements and its evolutionary interrelationships with anatomical variation. Playback experiments using video images modified with animation techniques will be used to asses the relative importance of different movements versus anatomy in the species recognition and mating behaviors.
