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| Food Preference in Zebrafish (Danio rerio): comparison of three food items |
| Amira Abozaid1, Melissa Scaramuzzo2, Hemali Patel2, Robert Gerlai1,2. 1University of Toronto, Department of Cell and Systems Biology, Toronto, ON, Canada; 2University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM), Psychology department, Mississauaga, ON, Canada |
Food is often employed as the unconditioned stimulus (US) in appetitive learning studies. However, different food types may have distinct rewarding values.� Thus, investigating what food types are preferred by the studied species is important.� No systematic food preference studies have been conducted on zebrafish (Danio rerio). The objective of this study is to study which of three commonly employed food types (pellets, flakes, or artemia) zebrafish prefer.� We presented zebrafish with a binary food choice task using the three food options in all possible combinations, and measured distance to feeding zone (cm), cumulative duration in feeding zone (sec), and frequency of entry into feeding zone. �We found zebrafish to show significant preference for artemia to pellets or flakes, while these latter two options were not differentiated. We conclude that artemia may be the best US for food reinforced appetitive learning tasks with zebrafish. |