Validating thermal refuge-seeking behaviour in zebrafish (Danio rerio) during acute thermal challenge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ectotherms, such as fish, are highly dependent on the stability of their environment to regulate body temperature, performance, and metabolism. Increasing temperatures cause behavioural changes in fish which can be observed and used as indices for determining upper thermal limits. The thermal agitation temperature (T ag ) is a recent, and ecologically significant, sublethal index for the upper thermal limit. Previous studies have described thermal agitation as the endpoint, prior to the critical thermal maximum (CT max ), where fish start exhibiting apparent refuge-seeking and thermal avoidance behaviour. It is an assumption that fish are seeking thermal refuge at T ag , but evidence for this is lacking. Therefore, this study aimed to validate this assumption by using zebrafish ( Danio rerio ) and providing them with thermal refuge while increasing their environment's temperature past T ag . The behavioural responses of D. rerio were observed and their spatial movements were tracked using the animal-tracking software, AnimalTA. The analysis from this study indicated that refuge is sought out prior to T ag and distance between shoal members increases after T ag , indicating D. rerio may trade-off the protective value of a shoal to search for thermal refuge. Our study demonstrates that with refuge available, D. rerio can surpass T ag until refuge itself exceeds T ag , validating that agitation is refuge-seeking behaviour, but a mechanism of last resort. This insight improves our understanding of fish responses to thermal stress and emphasizes the value of using T ag as a sublethal metric alongside CT max in thermal tolerance studies, with potential applications in ecology and conservation contexts. • Thermal agitation was verified as thermal-refuge seeking behavior of last resort. • Refuge-seeking behaviour occurs prior to thermal agitation in zebrafish. • Zebrafish may trade-off the protective value of a shoal to search for thermal refuge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".