Fish Shuttlebox System for Behavioural Studies

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This application by two Canada Research Chairs (an environmental physiologist and a behavioral scientist) with close collaborative links requests a unique computer-controlled shuttle-box system to study environmental choice in fish in real time. Four other research groups will also use the apparatus. The equipment allows the experimental animal to tell the investigator exactly which level of an environmental parameter in the water (salinity, temperature, dissolved O2, dissolved CO2, or pH) it prefers at a particular time. Two modules will allow simultaneous experiments with any two of the parameters. In the past, this sort of information could only be obtained in a crude manner by tedious visual observations in gradient systems. There is now increasing realization that acute exposure of an animal to an environmental challenge (e.g. low high salinity or low O2) imposes an unnatural situation, and therefore the responses observed may be unnatural as well. In the wild, a fish often has the ability to choose its environment, and to avoid a stressor, and the choice it makes may depend on its past history (e.g. acclimation, training, exposure to a toxicant) and its current physiology (e.g. digesting a meal, fasting, reproductive condition, coping with another stressor). This apparatus will provide this information. The systems will be used in both basic Discovery research (respiratory, metabolic, thermoregulatory, and ionoregulatory physiology, animal behavior), interdisciplinary research (global change and environmental management), and applied Strategic and CRD research projects (environmental toxicology, aquaculture), and will contribute to the training of 13 HQP in the labs of the two applicants, and up to 14 more in the labs of other team members, over the next 5 years.