Eden Forbes

Writing an MS analyzing naturalistic slimy sculpin behavior using @deeplabcut.bsky.social.

You can see sculpin pursuit governed by perception via the lateral line!! (it's dark down there - view lit by red light)

Have had a lot of fun working with these videos and wanted to share a couple 🐟.

Publication alert! 📣🌊

Happy to share this new work in collaboration with @dvm-uvm.bsky.social:
Distinct Food Web Responses to Environmental Gradients Suggest Different Effects of Invasive Species in a Large, Fragmented Lake 🐟🐚🌿

Check it here: rdcu.be/eYVky
doi: doi.org/10.1007/s100...

I hope these models serve as inspiration for laboratory/field work focused on animal pursuit. Additionally, I hope to demonstrate some of the power of BBE models and EAs, which have a rich history in artificial life and cognitive science, to biologists and ecologists.

9/9

CTRNNs are amenable to dynamical systems analysis. Three mechanisms generated saltatory movement during pursuit, either the excitation/inhibition of movement by target signal or repeated sampling by tactile foragers. The period of saltatory movement changed according to distance to the target.

8/N

EAs provide synthetic datasets to explore populations of solutions to a given task. In this case, saltatory (stop-and-go) movement frequently mediated pursuit behavior. Saltatory movement is one of the most common movement strategies in search, but less commonly discussed outside search.

7/N

I employed evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to generate a variety of possible solutions in each pursuit task. I allowed the EA to access small neural networks (CTRNNs) in each forager. This approach is often used in models of brain-body-environment (BBE) systems.

6/N

I wanted to know how different perceptual modalities and prey behaviors could shape pursuit behavior. As such, I modeled movement strategies in pursuit of stationary targets, varying both forager perceptual modality (continuous ‘visual’ v. movement-based ‘tactile’) and target reliability (+/-).

5/N

Additionally, almost all prey animals are cryptic in some way. Many exhibit behavioral crypsis, which may limit a forager’s ability to pursue that prey animal. This is true of mobile and sessile prey animals alike, the latter especially well represented by embryonic behavior in eggs.

4/N

In many cases, an encounter with a target does not imply its capture (‘soft’ encounters). Soft encounters are often represented by parameters that denote capture success. However, capture success depends on movement strategies contingent on perceptual apparatus, physiology, and environment.

3/N

A majority of animal movement models focus on search and encounters, or how animals move through an environment to find what they are looking for. Movement strategies post-encounter (e.g., during pursuit of an encountered target) are less well understood.

2/N

Now published, our paper on evolved movement strategies in the pursuit of targets with different perceptual modalities of a foraging animal and varying target signal reliability! 🧪🦁

Available open access in Movement Ecology.
Link: rdcu.be/eWOM9

1/N

A schematic of a death event in a multicellular system, where the loss of one cell results in a collapse in the dimensionality of the system. Each cell's essential variables have their ranges capped by viability constraints.

Where does the life-death boundary come from, and how will a cell's dynamics unfold relative to it? Myself, Eran Agmon, and Randy Beer argue for a theory of cellular viability, with new global organizing principles for cell fate.

Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07847

We’re currently running our first online ABM and IBM with @netlogo.bsky.social course after two in-person editions in Berlin & Łódź! Huge thanks to Volker Grimm, Steve Railsback & Jacob Kelter for their expert guidance

Thank you to everyone who joined us on this journey!

Thanks to my co-authors Randall Beer and Peter Todd. Link to the published version to come!

Happy to say one of my dissertation projects was accepted for publication in Movement Ecology!

We evolved small neural controllers to show how forager perception (visual v. tactile) and target signals generate different movement patterns during pursuit.

Pre-print: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...