Flight trajectories of fruit flies and mosquitoes in a wind tunnel.

This data file is a MySQL database file which must be uploaded to a MySQL database management system (DBMS) (e.g., via the MAMP installation: http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English, as was used in the associated manuscript). Once you have installed a MySQL DBMS on your machine, make a new database called “wind_tunnel_db”. To populate this database using the data file, first download all of the data files and join them together using:

cat wind_tunnel_db_* > wind_tunnel_db.sql

Then run the following command to populate the wind_tunnel_db MySQL database with the result.

/path/to/mysql -uroot -proot wind_tunnel_db < /path/to/wind_tunnel_db.sql

replacing the paths and username/passwords as appropriate. It will take several minutes since it is a large file.

The database contains several tables, which are mostly self explanatory. The key tables of interest are the “experiment” table, which lists the 4 experiments contained in this data set, the “timepoint” table, which contains the position, velocity, etc., of every fly/mosquito at every measured time point, and the “trajectory” table, which indicates which set of time points correspond to which individual trajectories. Other useful tables that have been pre-populated are the “crossing” table, which specifies trajectory segments corresponding to each plume crossing, and the “crossing_group” table, which groups sets of crossings together according to experiment and crossing identification criteria.

The code that interacts with this database and recreates the figures in the associated manuscript is contained at https://github.com/rkp8000/wind_tunnel.