Separation slang - Laboratory mice use low-frequency call repertoire during physical separation - Data for mouse-to-mouse distance and body angles

The discovery of a diverse repertoire of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) sparked interest in understanding their role in mouse social behavior. Social communication in mice is not just vocal, but multimodal and occurs mostly in close proximity. Aiming to unravel the impact direct physical interaction has on the vocal communication of same-sex mouse dyads, we separated mice through a divider preventing direct physical interaction, but allowing visual, olfactory and some tactile interaction through holes. Separated dyads emitted a distinct call repertoire consisting mainly of calls in or just above the human audible range (but not squeaks) as well as Noisy calls, and only to a lesser degree of USVs.

This dataset contains DeepSqueak-extracted acoustic parameters of mouse calls, DeepLabCut-generated mouse body part tracking coordinates and mouse body part coordinates at the time of call emission.

The archive 'call_data.tar.gz' contains spectro-temporal parameters of mouse calls extracted using DeepSqueak, stored in .xlsx files. Files are named according to the following scheme: Prefixed_Data_mouse-pair-ID-and-sex, e.g. Prefixed_Data_288m.xlsx

The archive 'mouse_coord_DLC.tar.gz' contains mouse body part coordinates generated using DeepLabCut and stored as .csv files. Files are named after the corresponding .xlsx file: Prefixed_Data_288m.csv

The archive 'np_data.tar.gz' contains processed data, i.e.

• for separated mice, the distance between the snouts of the two mice and the angle their bodies were positioned in at the time of call emission,
• for united mice, the distance between the mouse pair's snout-to-tail base distances as well as body position angle at the the time of call emission. Files are stored as NUMPY arrays and are named after the corresponding .xlsx file: Prefixed_Data_288m.xlsx.npy.

Both snout-to-snout and snout-to-tail base distances and body position angle were calculated as described here: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.26.678748