BODY SHAPE PLASTICITY OF ZEBRAFISH (DANIO RERIO) IN RESPONSE TO DIFFERENT REARING TEMPERATURES

摘要

Zebrafish, Danio rerio (Hamilton 1822), is a small colourful tropical fish that has become a very useful tool in the fields of Neurobiology and Developmental Biology, as a model-organism (Key and Devine, 2003). Numerous studies have shown, that environmental factors like temperature, pH and photoperiod have great influence on the life of fish in general. Temperature itself, is known to strongly affect the overall survival of fish (Lein et al., 1997) as well as other very important processes like hatching, metabolism, development (Herzig and Winkler, 1986), external morphology (Turan, 2004), swimming performance (Koumoundouros et al., 2002a) and sex differentiation (Koumoundouros et al., 2002b). The goal of this study was to examine the effects of rearing temperature on the differentiation of the body shape in zebrafish, under strictly controlled conditions.