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Zebrafish is a model organism that is receiving considerable attention in preclinical research. Particularly important is the use of zebrafish in behavioral pharmacology, where a number of high-throughput experimental paradigms have been proposed to quantify the effect of psychoactive substances consequences on individual and social behavior. In an effort to assist experimental research and improve animal welfare, we propose a mathematical model for the social behavior of groups of zebrafish swimming in a shallow water tank in response to the administration of psychoactive compounds to select individuals. We specialize the mathematical model to caffeine, a popular anxiogenic compound. Each fish is assigned to a Markov chain that describes transitions between freezing and swimming. When swimming, zebrafish locomotion is modeled as a pair of coupled stochastic differential equations, describing the time evolution of the turn-rate and speed in response to caffeine administration. Comparison with experimental results demonstrates the accuracy of the model and its potential use in the design of in-silico experiments.
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Can robotic fish help zebrafish learn to open doors?
Zebrafish is a widely used animal model in behavioral neuroscience. However, zebrafish learning capabilities are not completely understood. Technological advancements in robotics promise fine behavioral control of artificial conspecifics to study complex aspects of social behavior. In this work, we developed a training system aimed at investigating individual and social learning of zebrafish. The system consists of a shallow water tank, a 2- dimensional robotic platform, and a real-time tracking software. In the tank, a focal individual is separated from a shoal of conspecifics by a one-way glass and a transparent partition, allowing the focal fish to see the shoal. In the transparent partition are two doors, one that automatically opens when the focal individual spends a predetermined amount of time in front of it and another that remains closed regardless of the fish behavior. We tested the system by training one na¨ıve fish in individual learning and one fish in social learning over 20 sessions. Test results show that the fish can learn to open the door and also validated the effectiveness of the developed system applying on individual and social learning.
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- PAR ID:
- 10166721
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation, Bioinspiration, Biomimetics, and Bioreplication IX, 2019
- Volume:
- 10965
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2514289
