Fish personality, memory and learning hability: the effect of pharmaceuticals and abiotic factors

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Tiago André Azevedo dos
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/22023
• topic: Peixes - Comportamento animal; Medicamentos - Toxicologia ambiental

Over the last years, animal personality has been gaining a lot of attention from the scientific community, and, at the moment, it is being questioned its importance in survival and the evolution of species in stress situation. Between all of potential stress agents, there are emerging environmental contaminants, such as, pharmaceuticals. However, there are not many behavior and personality studies in fish. The present work aims to increase the knowledge of how factors associated with personality can influence the response to pharmaceuticals detected in the environment. For model organism, the zebrafish (Danio rerio) was chosen, and 8 months old organism were selected. Animals were separated, based on behavior responses, in two classes, bold and shy. After the selection, organisms were exposed, during 96h to a human drug, gemfibrozil, used as a lipid regulator. During the experimental assay, behavior parameters that allowed to evaluate the capacity of response to stimuli, and memory to adaptation were assessed. After 96h of exposure, associated parameters and oxidative stress were equally assessed. Bold fish traveled a bigger distance than shy fish. Furthermore, shy fish expressed higher LPO levels than bold fish, and fish from the control group, as well as, shy fish exposed to the lowest concentration of gemfibrozil expressed more LPO than shy fish exposed to the higher concentrations of gemfibrozil