Born in complexity: How the early life environment shapes zebrafish larvae phenotype
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The biotic and abiotic environments are potent drivers of individual plasticity. Zebrafish, a popular research model around the world, has been extensively used for understanding the proximate cause and mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity to environmental enrichment. Despite awareness of providing high-standard rearing condition for increasing fish welfare, rearing of zebrafish larvae involves little more than stable temperature and daily water changes. We asked whether including Lego bricks as additional visual and mechanosensory stimuli during early rearing would induce developmental plasticity across morphological (growth, forebrain cell proliferation), physiological (stress response), and behavioural (anxiety, habituation) endpoints. We raised zebrafish in Petri dishes with complexity (Lego bricks) from fertilization to 5 days post-fertilization (dpf) and then compared phenotypes to those of traditionally reared larvae (barren). Relative to barren-reared larvae, those raised with complexity were shorter and did not increase whole body cortisol in response to an acute agitation stressor. Forebrain cell proliferation was not different between treatments, however, larvae raised with complexity habituated sooner to an adverse stimulus and showed a tendency towards reduced anxiety-like behaviour, suggesting the anxiolytic effects of environmental enrichment may be initiated at early life stages. Taken together, our results invite consideration into how current practices in raising zebrafish may influence neurodevelopment and behavioural research findings, and may be applied to improve outcomes in fish breeding programs for conservation initiatives. • A complex rearing environment induced phenotypic changes in zebrafish larvae. • Larvae reared with Legos were smaller and did not respond to an acute stressor. • Larvae reared with Legos showed greater cognitive ability, but forebrain cell proliferation was similar to larvae reared in water alone. • Despite no difference in forebrain cell proliferation, larvae reared with Legos had greater cognitive ability. • Beyond zebrafish husbandry, these results may be relevant to fish breeding programs for conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".