A Psychological Aversive Condition Does Not Change Individual Zebrafish Preference For Background Color Or Artificial Plant Enrichments

ABSTRACT

Information on fish preference for environmental conditions can be a useful tool to offer them what they want, an important requirement for welfare purposes. Giving that such an approach deals with psychological states of the fish, we investigated whether psychological stress affects fish preference. In this study, we found that the aversive condition of crossing a white open field did not change individual zebrafish’s preference for color background or for plant enrichments, despite a great individual variability of preference response. We conclude that individual preferences for environmental conditions are maintained even following a psychological stressor, and highlight that variability in preference options among individuals raises questions about how to best improve welfare of grouped zebrafish.

KEYWORDS:

• Preferred option
• physical effort
• psychological stressor
• aversive condition
• danio rerio

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Elisabeth A M Maia, for her great help to register behavioral data from videos and Bryan Ferguson for helping to build the experimental apparatus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) under Grant (process # 2012/244330). Fish facilities, material and equipment used were supported by the USDA Grant AES 4558. The study was carried out in the Pennsylvania State University.