High-resolution, 1-hour, locomotor time series of Japanese quail in diverse social environments

We favor the conformation of divergent social environments by using the preselecting animals based on a combination of the 4 behavioral tests described in the proyect description. Social groups composed of three adult quail, 2 females and 1 male (156-171 days old). We used IdTracker 64 in MATLAB R2017a to register locomotion at 0.5 s intervals during a 1 h period (7200 time intervals) between 9 and 10 am immediately housing in novel environment (Day1) and after 48 hours(Day3) of habituation to the novel setting. Behavioral data was recorded in the form of a time series of mutually exclusive states. At any given time, if the bird was moving a number one was recorded or a zero if immobile. Groups were housed in a white wooden apparatus measuring 80 x 40 x 40 cm (width x length x height, respectively) with wood-shavings on the floor. A feeder and an automatic nipple drinker were positioned in opposite corners of the apparatus. Nylon monofilament line was extended over the top of the boxes with a 1 cm separation in order to prevent the birds from escaping without interfering with their visualization. A video camera was suspended 1.5m above the box to record behavior. Since only 4 social groups could be tested simultaneously, the setup was repeated 3 consecutive times. For convenience boxes in which each social group were placed were numbered 1-12, where boxes 1-4 were tested simultaneously first, 5-8 second and 9-12 last. Locomotor time series are stored as text files (.txt). Considering that the 36 animals were evaluated in 12 mixed-sex groups of 3 birds in individual experimental boxes, each subject quail was identified by their experimental group number (Box), ID number of wing band, and sex (femaleA, femaleB or male). In the case of females an indication A or B is used to discriminate between the two birds. In the file name an indication of the corresponding bird is provided as "BoxNº_IDNº_sex_DayNº". Data descriptor published in Caliva, J.M., Alcala, R.S., Guzmán, D.A. et al. High-resolution behavioral time series of Japanese quail within their social environment. Sci Data 6, 300 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0299-8 t The spatial coordanates from each animal obtained from IdTracker was also used to estimate the duration of without and with spatial displacement events. As in the case of the locomotor time series, at any given time, if the bird moved over the 1 cm threshold during the sampling interval (i.e. 0.1 or 1s) a number one was recorded, or zero if immobile. For each bird, behavioral events defined as the interval of time that an animal continuously performs a given behavior. In practice this consists in counting the number of continuous sampling intervals in the time series in which the behavior was recorded. Event durations are expresed in miliseconds. Files are found in the Event_durations(miliseconds) folder.