Now that the fish have settled in, it is time to start putting them to work. In order to understand more about how the brains of fish work, I study their behaviour. While some researchers studying animal behaviour observe animals acting naturally in the wild, I run experiments in the lab designed to determine if fish can perform specific tasks.Whether or not they can perform a specific tasks can tell me important information about how their brains work.

A really simple example would be if we asked the question: do fish see colour? To answer this, we can present the fish with two identical objects, except that one is blue and the other is red. We can train the fish to select one of the objects, either the red or blue. If they can learn to select a particular object then we know the fish are able to see two colours. Now there is a lot more to testing colour vision, but this is the general idea of how I use behavioural experiments to answer complex questions.

I mentioned that I train fish… When I say this, most people give me a blank look and then ask: ‘but don’t fish have a 3 second memory?’ So before I explain how this is done, I need to pause and just clear up a little myth about fish.

FISH DO NOT HAVE A 3 SECOND MEMORY!!!

Ok now that we have that out of the way… To train fish, I use operant conditioning. Operant conditioning means that I use a positive reward to reinforce a behaviour that the fish would naturally do. In this case, the fish will naturally bite at things that are put in their tank. When they bite at the item I want, I reward the fish with a piece of food. This form of training only works if the fish are interested in performing the task. Luckily for me, triggerfish are curious by nature and love to bite at whatever I put in their tanks. And of course they love food!

At the beginning of this video, a fish is behind a white wall with a sliding door. When I open the door, the fish swims through. There they can see another white board with four circles on it. These circles are printed pieces of paper that are laminated. I stick them to the board with velcro dots.

You can then see the fish take a bite at the darkest one. This is the correct response from the fish, and I therefore feed the fish using forceps (because they bite!). My favorite bit is how the fish then swims back through the door to wait to start the process all over again.

I love this door that I had made as it provides a clear indicator to the fish of when a trial begins, and it protects me from being bitten when I put the stimuli board in the tank. However sometimes the fish get impatient with me and start spitting water at me out of the tank. Such demanding little fishies!

It has taken a couple of months to get my new aquarium system ready for experiments and I am so excited that I finally have the fish I will be using for actual experiments.

For my research, I am using Picasso triggerfish (Rhinecanthus aculeatus) as my study species. These beautiful fish have so much personality. They are curious and expressive and will pretty much bite at anything. When working with them, you have to be careful not to leave your hand in their tank or you will get a surprising nip taken out of you!

You can see in my video below that they will attack things that come too close to the glass of their tanks as well (in this case it is my finger).

This species is found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and on coral reefs around the world. They are omnivorous and territorial. They spend much of their day swimming around their home region taking exploratory bites out of pretty much everything

In their tanks at the lab, the fish seem to enjoy rearranging the gravel by picking it up with their mouths and dumping it elsewhere.

One of my favorite parts of research is the many opportunities I get to build things. Given a handful of cable ties, some duct tape and a saw you would be surprised what you can pull together.

Upon starting my new position as a research fellow at the University of Oxford, the first thing I had to do was build myself an aquarium system. I have used several different systems throughout my research career and had a good idea of what I wanted and what would suit my research. It was pretty exciting to be able to build a whole system just for me!

I decided to build two flow-through aquarium systems. A flow-through system means that all the tanks are connected by pipes and therefore the same water flows through all the tanks. First, I had to design the system and source all the equipment (tanks, pumps, lights, pipes, glue, you name it) which took quite a long time. Then came time to build it…

The laboratory space I was given already had racks for tanks so I needed to add tanks and plumbing. Getting all the pipes cut and in place so that water can flow through the system took a lot of time and effort. As I was several months pregnant at the time, my husband came in to help me do some of the heavy lifting.

Once the plumbing was all finished, water was added and we watched for leaks. Unfortunately we had a leak in the bottom sump system where the water gets filtered! Luckily it was nothing one or two tubes of silicon couldn’t fix.

In this type of aquarium system, the filtration happens in the bottom sump compartment. My system has a biofilter, a protein skimmer, and some algae.

After several weeks, we were all finished and could finally add some fish!