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Tadpoles display preferences for different environments but the sensory modalities that govern these choices are not well understood. Here, we examined light preferences and associated sensory mechanisms of albino and wild-type Xenopus laevis tadpoles. We found that albino tadpoles spent more time in darker environments compared to the wild type, although they showed no differences in overall activity. This preference persisted when the tadpoles had their optic nerve severed or pineal glands removed, suggesting these sensory systems alone are not necessary for phototaxis. These experiments were conducted by an undergraduate laboratory course, highlighting how X. laevis tadpole behavior assays in a classroom setting can reveal new insights into animal behavior. 

Many ant species are equipped with chemical defenses, although how these compounds impact nervous system function is unclear. Here, we examined the utility of Caenorhabditis elegans chemotaxis assays for investigating how ant chemical defense compounds are detected by heterospecific nervous systems. We found that C. elegans respond to extracts from the invasive Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile) and the osm-9 ion channel is required for this response. Divergent strains varied in their response to L. humile extracts, suggesting genetic variation underlying chemotactic responses. These experiments were conducted by an undergraduate laboratory course, highlighting how C. elegans chemotaxis assays in a classroom setting can provide genuine research experiences and reveal new insights into interspecies interactions. 

Extensive TTS corpora exist for commercial systems cre- ated for high-resource languages such as Mandarin, English, and Japanese. Speakers recorded for these corpora are typically instructed to maintain constant f0, energy, and speaking rate and are recorded in ideal acoustic environments, producing clean, consistent audio. We have been developing TTS systems from “found” data collected for other purposes (e.g. training ASR systems) or available on the web (e.g. news broadcasts, au- diobooks) to produce TTS systems for low-resource languages (LRLs) which do not currently have expensive, commercial sys- tems. This study investigates whether traditional TTS speakers do exhibit significantly less variation and better speaking char- acteristics than speakers in found genres. By examining char- acteristics of f0, energy, speaking rate, articulation, NHR, jit- ter, and shimmer in found genres and comparing these to tra- ditional TTS corpora, We have found that TTS recordings are indeed characterized by low mean pitch, standard deviation of energy, speaking rate, and level of articulation, and low mean and standard deviations of shimmer and NHR; in a number of respects these are quite similar to some found genres. By iden- tifying similarities and differences, we are able to identify ob- jective methods for selecting found data to build TTS systems for LRLs.