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 2 mm 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.

Rearing Conditions and Automated Feed Distribution Systems for Zebrafish (Danio rerio)

“…Different feeding regimens and feeding amounts can, in fact, affect growth and reproductive performance in wild-type zebrafish [47] and, as an example, modulate melanoma tumor onset in a p53/BRAF zebrafish line [89], respectively. Moreover, especially in facilities with many tanks, the lack of automated systems leads to the appearance of musculoskeletal disorders among technicians in charge of feeding the reared zebrafish [90]. In recent years, advanced technologies such as machine vision, acoustic technology, and sensor data fusion have gradually been applied to large-scale and refined aquaculture [91,92].…”

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

“…It is open to new contributions and available for download at http://data.ljp.upmc.fr/datasets/TD2/ . All videos have been either previously published [ 13 , 15 – 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.…”

“…Finally, we implemented an algorithm to determine nearly-optimized tracking parameters automatically. FastTrack has already been used in a few publications [ 15 , 16 ] and is currently used for several research projects in Physics and Biology. The raw data for all plots can be found in S1 Data .…”

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 * Correspondence: merlin.lange@czbiohub.org, loic.royer@czbiohub.org 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.…”