Quantifying pigment cover to assess variation in animal colouration
| Autor: | Andjin Siegenthaler, Debapriya Mondal, Chiara Benvenuto |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Ecology (disciplines) Variation (game tree) Crangon crangon General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology 03 medical and health sciences Pigment Chromatophore Index Methods Manuscript biology Ecology Environmental adaptation Animal coloration biology.organism_classification ImageJ chromatophores 030104 developmental biology colour change visual_art Pigment migration visual_art.visual_art_medium chromatosomes colour threshold General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Biological system |
| Zdroj: | Biology Methods & Protocols |
| ISSN: | 2396-8923 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/biomethods/bpx003 |
| Popis: | The study of animal colouration addresses fundamental and applied aspects relevant to a wide range of fields, including behavioural ecology, environmental adaptation and visual ecology. Although a variety of methods are available to measure animal colours, only few focus on chromatophores (specialized cells containing pigments) and pigment migration. Here, we illustrate a freely available and user-friendly method to quantify pigment cover (PiC) with high precision and low effort using digital images, where the foreground (i.e. pigments in chromatophores) can be detected and separated from the background. Images of the brown shrimp, Crangon crangon, were used to compare PiC with the traditional Chromatophore Index (CI). Results indicate that PiC outcompetes CI for pigment detection and transparency measures in terms of speed, accuracy and precision. The proposed methodology provides researchers with a useful tool to answer essential physiological, behavioural and evolutionary questions on animal colouration in a wide range of species. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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