Hayato M. Yamanouchi

Systems Ethology — Neuroethology × Informatics

Second-year PhD student, Kamikouchi Laboratory, Nagoya University
JSPS Research Fellow (DC1)

Tools I develop

YORU

An animal behavior recognition system based on object detection

YORU lets you define animal behaviors directly through object detection, detect them in real time, and trigger external devices. A preprint is available on bioRxiv, and the source code is on GitHub.

Read the paper on bioRxiv

GitHub repository

More about YORU

Research

Aiming to understand animal behavior as a system, I pursue three lines of research.

Neural mechanisms of copulation behavior in Drosophila

I study the neural circuits that control copulation behavior in Drosophila melanogaster. The fly has a central nervous system together with a rich genetic toolkit, a short generation time, easy husbandry, and stereotyped behavioral patterns, making it an excellent model organism for investigating the neural basis of behavior.

Real-time behavioral intervention systems

I develop real-time intervention systems that activate a device the moment an animal performs a particular behavior. Conventional behavioral analysis mostly relies on reviewing recorded video after the fact, but detecting a behavior as it happens and applying optogenetic manipulation on the spot allows a far more direct approach to the relationship between behavior and neural activity.

Systems Ethology

Ethology has long been guided by Niko Tinbergen’s four questions: causation, ontogeny, survival value, and evolution. In practice, however, each is pursued separately within its own field, and whatever falls outside the current focus tends to be treated as a black box.