Animal Behavior Research

Don’t we all enjoy the variety and intensity of bird colors? Male birds have perhaps the most impressive color display in nature.

In the beginning of this year I wrote a post about the Morris water maze test, a popular and well-validated paradigm to study learning and memory in rats and mice.

Zebrafish are not the first species one might think of as being exposed to alcohol in their natural environment.

Behavior of laboratory rodents is often studied in well-controlled, simple experiments, in an environment that is fundamentally different from the animal’s home cage.

A great example of optogenetics in behavioral studies is the work of Dr. Kravitz and Dr. Kreitzer at the Kreitzer lab (currently, Kravitz works at the NIDDK in Bethesda). Let me tell you about it.

Last year the news was hitting the internet: The Zwiebel lab (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) may have found a new bug repellant that is stronger than DEET.

Brains are complicated. We all know that. Like an entangled bunch of wires. Still, over the years, neuroscientists have been able to map out several brain regions and their functions in behavior and physiology.

Recognizing the lack of hands-on education, Dr. Kalueff has started organizing zebrafish behavioral neuroscience and phenotyping workshops. The workshops ran just before and after the SfN annual meeting, October 2012.

The study of behavior has proven itself to be useful in the context of ecotoxicology; the assessment of the impact of pesticides on ecology systems. It is a valuable tool in the risk assessment.

I have been reading a lot about zebrafish research lately and I thought it would be nice to share some of my favorite articles with you.