Abstract
In the past few decades, aquatic animals have become popular model organisms in biology, spurring a growing need for establishing aquatic facilities. Zebrafish are widely studied and relatively easy to culture using commercial systems. However, a challenging aspect of maintaining aquatic facilities is animal feeding, which is both time- and resource-consuming. We have developed an open-source fully automatic daily feeding system, Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF). ZAF is reliable, provides a standardized amount of food to every tank, is cost-efficient and easy to build. The advanced version, ZAF+, allows for the precise control of food distribution as a function of fish density per tank, and has a user-friendly interface. Both ZAF and ZAF+ are adaptable to any laboratory environment and facilitate the implementation of aquatic colonies. Here, we provide all blueprints and instructions for building the mechanics, electronics, fluidics, as well as to setup the control software and its user-friendly graphical interface. Importantly, the design is modular and can be scaled to meet different user needs. Furthermore, our results show that ZAF and ZAF+ do not adversely affect zebrafish culture, enabling fully automatic feeding for any aquatic facility.
Highlights
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a well-established animal model in biology, with increasing use in different fields[1,2], including developmental biology[3], neuroscience[4] and genetics[5]
To facilitate access to zebrafish research, and to reduce the amount of work needed to rear these animals, we developed a small semi-automated aquatic facility system that can be built within a regular wet lab
We introduce two affordable and easy to build automatic feeding systems: Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF) and ZAF+ (Video 1)
Summary
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is a well-established animal model in biology, with increasing use in different fields[1,2], including developmental biology[3], neuroscience[4] and genetics[5] Among their advantages, zebrafish are vertebrates and have excellent optical properties as well as accessible genetics. All blueprints and instructions for building a flexible and scalable fully automated feeding system should be available to the zebrafish community. Such a design should be optimised for simplicity to facilitate adoption, avoiding complex 3D printing, mechanical assembly, or complex circuit board manufacturing. We present ZAF (Zebrafish Automated Feeding) which satisfies all these requirements for automatic feeding of zebrafish as well as for any similar aquatic model organism
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