A semi-automatic dispenser for solid and liquid food in aquatic facilities

Abstract

We present a novel, low-footprint and low-cost semi-automatic system for delivering solid and liquid food to zebrafish, and more generally to aquatic animals raised in racks of tanks. It is composed of a portable main module equipped with a contactless reader that adjusts the quantity to deliver for each tank, and either a solid food module or a liquid food module. Solid food comprises virtually any kind of dry powder or grains below two millimeters in diameter, and, for liquid-mediated food, brine shrimps (Artemia salina) and rotifers (Rotifera) have been successfully tested. Real-world testing, feedback and validation have been performed in a zebrafish facility for several months. In comparison with manual feeding this system mitigates the appearance of musculoskeletal disorders among regularly-feeding staff, and let operators observe the animals' behavior instead of being focused on quantities to deliver. We also tested the accuracy of both humans and our dispenser and found that the semi-automatic system is much more reliable, with respectively 7-fold and 84-fold drops in standard deviation for solid and liquid food.

FastTrack: an open-source software for tracking varying numbers of deformable objects

“…previously published [13,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] or have been kindly provided by their authors and are licenced under the Non-Commercial, Share-Alike Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Each movie has an unique identifier composed of three letters and three digits (e.g.…”

“…FastTrack has already been used in a few publications [15,16] and is currently used for several research projects in Physics and Biology.…”

ZAF, the first open source fully automated feeder for aquatic facilities

“…The most important aspect of zebrafish husbandry is the feeding, usually done manually at least two times a day by dedicated staff, using dry or living food like Artemia nauplii 8 . Overall, manual feeding is not sufficiently accurate and can be time and resource prohibitive for labs without dedicated staff 9 . Very few technologies have been developed to automate zebrafish feeding and husbandry to help offset the challenges associated with implementing an aquatic facility.…”

“…Some vendors propose fully automated solutions, but these are typically expensive, proprietary, incompatible with other systems, and require manual food filling before each feeding session. Other groups have recently published semi-automatic solutions that require human supervision 9,10 . However, there is no open access and fully automated solution currently available.…”