Data from: Pike, T.W. & Burman, O.H.P. Simulating individual movement in fish. Scientific Reports.

Accurately quantifying an animal’s movement is crucial for developing a greater empirical and theoretical understanding of its behaviour, and for simulating biologically plausible movement patterns. However, we have a relatively poor understanding of how animals move at fine temporal scales and in three-dimensional environments. Here, we collected high temporal resolution data on the three-dimensional spatial positions of individual three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), allowing us to derive statistics describing key geometric characteristics of their movement and to quantify the extent to which this varies between individuals. We then used these statistics to develop a simple model of fish movement and evaluated the biological plausibility of simulated movement paths using a Turing-type test, which quantified the association preferences of live fish towards animated conspecifics following either ‘real’ (i.e., based on empirical measurements) or simulated movements. Live fish showed no difference in their response to ‘real’ movement compared to movement simulated by the model, although significantly preferred modelled movement over putatively unnatural movement patterns. The model therefore has the potential to facilitate a greater understanding of the causes and consequences of individual variation in movement, as well as enabling the construction of agent-based models or real-time computer animations in which individual fish move in biologically feasible ways.精准量化动物的运动，对于深化对其行为的实证与理论认知，以及模拟具备生物学合理性的运动模式均至关重要。然而，目前学界对动物在精细时间尺度与三维环境中的运动方式仍知之甚少。本研究中，我们采集了单个三刺棘鱼（Gasterosteus aculeatus）的三维空间位置高时间分辨率数据，借此推导出描述其运动关键几何特征的统计量，并量化了个体间运动差异的程度。随后，我们利用这些统计量构建了简化的鱼类运动模型，并通过图灵类测试（Turing-type test）评估了模拟运动路径的生物学合理性：该测试量化了活鱼对跟随"真实"（即基于实证测量所得）或模拟运动的动画同种个体的关联偏好。尽管活鱼对模型模拟的运动的偏好显著高于推测的非自然运动模式，但它们对模型模拟运动与真实运动的响应并无差异。因此，该模型不仅有助于深化对运动个体差异的成因与后果的认知，还可用于构建以生物学可行方式运动的单条鱼类的基于智能体的模型或实时计算机动画。