Time: 20.02.2026, 18:30
Place: University of Warsaw Faculty of Biology, Room 103B
Participation: Anyone interested can join the meeting; you do not need to belong to the student club or to UW!
Description:
Pyrrohocoris apterus — the firebug (also called cemetery bug, tram driver, or wingless blacksmith) — after copulation connect with their reproductive organs into pairs called tandems, in which they remain from several hours to — in rare cases — seven days. During that time the pair moves together, obtains food and likely interacts with other individuals.
During the meeting I will talk about research I conducted on pairs of blacksmith bugs, trying to determine a very basic but so far undescribed scientific question — what determines which insect is at the front of the tandem? Does one of them lead the movement? Is there cooperation between them? I will focus on analysis of behavioral recordings using DeepLabCut, a convolutional neural network that has become a standard for behavior analysis in modern neurobiology. I will also talk about other programs used for behavioral research, such as Bonsai and SimBA. At the end I will present my interpretation of the study results in an evolutionary context and the next steps I would like to take in studying blacksmith bugs.
I invite you to the world of behavioral research on non-traditional model organisms!
Co-author of the article: "Brains are expensive, but cognition is often cheap" (Kondrakiewicz & Nawrocka, 2025).
