In the Star Trek universe, Scotty can ”beam you up” and teleport you to a location. Even though science fiction is yet to be reality, is teleporting still possible? Recently, we have developed a robotic platform that is capable of teleporting the behavior of fish from one tank to another through biologically-inspired robotic replicas which map the behavior of a fish from a tank to the other one. Our results indicate that behavioral teleporting is a promising tool to study the biological determinants of behavior. Here we demonstrate its use in pharmacological research, by investigating the effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors of social interactions.

Robotics is emerging as a promising approach to study animal behavior. Biologically-inspired robots can manipulate the behavior of live animals and are increasingly employed to uncover the underpinnings of sociality and mate choice in the animal realm. But behavioral variation between animals plays a critical role for their ecology and evolution, and ultimately it determines variation in the survival, growth, and reproduction of individuals. While the study of behavioral responses of animals toward their robotic counterparts dominates the literature, it remains largely untested whether the life-history strategies of live animals can be artificially manipulated with biologically-inspired robots. Recently, predator-mimicking robots allowed to successfully study antipredator responses of highly invasive fish in detail, revealing that costs of behavioral alternations induced by robotic predators can impact the health and survival of invaders. The evidence that biologically-inspired robots can undermine the ecological success of invasive animals opens the door to novel experimental analyses at the interface between robotics, ecology, and invasion biology.