The social zebrafish: behavioral responses to conspecific, heterospecific, and computer animated fish

Zebrafish has been in the forefront of developmental biology and genetics, but only recently has interest in their behavior increased. Zebrafish are small and prolific, which lends this species to high throughput screening applications. A typical feature of zebrafish is its propensity to aggregate in groups, a behavior known as shoaling. Thus, zebrafish has been proposed as a possible model organism appropriate for the analysis of the genetics of vertebrate social behavior. However, shoaling behavior is not well characterized in zebrafish. Here, using a recently developed software application, we first investigate how zebrafish respond to conspecific and heterospecific fish species that differ in coloration and/or shoaling tendencies. We found that zebrafish shoaled with their own species but not with two heterospecific species, one of which was a shoaling the other a non-shoaling species. In addition, we have started the analysis of visual stimuli that zebrafish may utilize to determine whether to shoal with a fish or not. We systematically modified the color, the location, the pattern, and the body shape of computer animated zebrafish images and presented them to experimental zebrafish. The subjects responded differentially to some of these stimuli showing preference for yellow and avoidance of elongated zebrafish images. Our results suggest that computerized stimulus presentation and automated behavioral quantification of zebrafish responses are feasible, which in turn implies that high throughput forward genetic mutation or drug screening will be possible in the analysis of social behavior with this model organism.