[A formal description of mammals' behavior based on data on snow tracking, with pine marten (Martes martes) as a case study].

Abstract

The formalism allowing to describe animals' behavior is based on the model of informational interactions between an animal and its environment. The model may be represented as an assemblage consisting of two blocks. The first block, which corresponds to the perception system, is a probabilistic operator: it selects an object of certain class out of many objects randomly encountered by an animal while it moves around. The selected object keeps its actuality as an input symbol for the second block of the assemblage during one or several cycles of the block operation. The second block, being afinite structural probabilistic automaton, generates output reactions to the input symbol. The structural automaton, which consists of elementary automata, produces a sequence of output reactions in course of interactions with the selected object: After exhaustion of the previous input actuality, the assemblage moves to the next cycle. At that, the probabilistic operator comes back to the receptive state and produces next output. Automaton "inputs" correspond to objects of certain classes, selectively perceived by an animal; "outputs" correspond to a sequence of elementary motor reactions. Based on data on snow tracking of pine marten foraging activity, there have been composed: the assemblage input and output alphabets, a conjugation matrix of input signals and internal states of the first elementary automaton that is contained in the second block structure, and transition probability matrices for the states of the second block elementary automata, which are defined for a class of environmental objects when foraging activity occurs. The proposed formalism makes it possible to convert field data on tracking into the unified form, detect key circumstances of animals' behavioral activity, and analyze this natural phenomenon in detail.