Collective synchrony of mating signals modulated by ecological cues and social signals in bioluminescent sea fireflies

Individuals often employ simple rules that can emergently synchronise behaviour. Some collective behaviours are intuitively beneficial, but others like mate signalling in leks occur across taxa despite theoretical individual costs. Whether disparate instances of synchronous signalling are similarly organised is unknown, largely due to challenges observing many individuals simultaneously. Recording field collectives and ex situ playback experiments, we describe principles of synchronous bioluminescent signals produced by marine ostracods (Crustacea; Luxorina) that seem behaviorally convergent with terrestrial fireflies, and with whom they last shared a common ancestor over 500 mya. Like synchronous fireflies, groups of signalling males use visual cues (intensity and duration of light) to decide when to signal. Individual ostracods also modulate their signal based on the distance to nearest neighbours. During peak darkness, luminescent \"waves\" of synchronous displays emerge and ripple acr..., Data are a mixture of types from different methods and experiments. They are most clearly outliend and used in conjunciton with the provided R code for context. Briefly, the majority of data are from observations of collective bioluminescent behaviors of wild, naturally kept, or experimentally manipulated ostracods (marine crustaceans). We used either cameras or human observations to record data. Camera data was either post-processed using computer vision or annotated by eye to record the number of bright pixels or number of behaviors, respectively. One data set was collected with a spectroradiometer, as described in the methods of the paper. Images in the dataset are demonstrative of the methods., , # Collective synchrony of mating signals modulated by ecological cues and social signals in bioluminescent sea fireflies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6m905qg6c](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6m905qg6c)

These data are different video or human annotations of behavioral data when observing collective behaviors of bioluminescent mating signals.

The goal of the R code and data include is to seamlessly recapitulate all analyses and figures from the manuscript. When downloading, as along as the paths to the datafile are changed to match the downloaded folder with the datasets (and proper dependencies are downloaded), everything else should run smoothly. Understanding the context and results of these data are best done in conjunction with the R code provided.

In order to prevent the R code from experiencing difficulties, the data are left with blank cells, missing columns names, etc. and instead manipulated, cleaned, and processed entirely within the R environment. Any blank cells or colu...