Why Retro-Identification Is the Key to Efficient Behavioural Research in Animals

Markerless retro-identification of animals is a novel concept and practical technique to identify past occurrences of organisms in archived data. It complements traditional forward-looking chronological reidentification methods in longitudinal behavioural research. Our study dataset comprises observations made of morphologically similar reed bees (Exoneura robusta) over five days. We evaluated model performance by training on final day five data, testing on the sequence of preceding days, and comparing results to the usual chronological evaluation from day one. Results indicate no significant accuracy difference between models. This underscores retro-identified’s value in improving resource efficiency in longitudinal animal studies.