70 hour locomotor, feeding and drinking behavioral time series of female Japanese quail

Adult female quails were individually housed in 40 x 40 x 40cm (width × length × height, respectively) boxes with 3 solid white walls and one wire mesh wall that allowed visual contact with the female located in the contiguous box. Nylon monofilament line was extended over the top of the boxes with a 1 cm separation to prevent the birds from escaping without interfering with their visualization. A 14 light: 10 dark cycle was used. A video camera connected to a computer was suspended 1.5 m above the box. These cameras have built-in, infrared LED lighting, automatically switching to infrared recording after lights were turned off. Boxes had feeder, automatic nipple drinker, and floor with wood shavings. A period of at least 30 days acclimatization was taken before the actual 70 hora long recordings were performed. Locomotor activity data was obtained using ANY-maze video tracking system, at 0.5s sampling interval. Feeding and Drinking behavior was registered through visual observation of video-recording using customized software in Matlab, allowing high resolution data acquisition. Data from 2 animals are shown. Data was integrated in either 6min or 1min time intervals. Analysis was presented in Kembro et al (2023) A dynamically coherent pattern of rhythms that matches between distant species across the evolutionary scale. Sci Rep. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32286-0