Recordings in an integrating central neuron provide a quick way for identifying appropriate anaesthetic use in fish

In animal husbandry, livestock industry and research facilities, anaesthetic agents are frequently used to moderate stressful intervention. For mammals and birds, procedures have been established to fine-tune anaesthesia according to the intervention. In ectothermic vertebrates, however, and despite changes in legislation and growing evidence on their cognitive abilities, the presently available information is insufficient to make similarly informed decisions. Here we suggest a straightforward way for rapidly filling this gap. By recording from a command neuron in the brain of fish whose crucial role requires it to integrate and process information from all sensory systems and to relay it to motor output pathways, the specific effects of candidate anaesthesia on central processing of sensory information can directly and efficiently be probed. Our approach allows a rapid and reliable way of deciding if and at which concentration a given anaesthetic affects the central nervous system and sensory processing. We employ our method to four anaesthetics commonly used in fish and demonstrate that our method quickly and with small numbers of animals provides the critical data for informed decisions on anaesthetic use.