Establishing zebrafish as a model to study the anxiolytic effects of scopolamine.

Scopolamine (hyoscine) is a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist that has traditionally been used to treat motion sickness in humans. However, studies investigating depressed and bipolar populations have found that scopolamine is also effective at reducing depression and anxiety symptoms. The potential anxiety-reducing (anxiolytic) effects of scopolamine could have great clinical implications for humans; however, rats and mice administered scopolamine showed increased anxiety in standard behavioural tests.

Episodic-like memory in zebrafish.

Episodic-like memory tests often aid in determining an animal's ability to recall the what, where, and which (context) of an event. To date, this type of memory has been demonstrated in humans, wild chacma baboons, corvids (Scrub jays), humming birds, mice, rats, Yucatan minipigs, and cuttlefish. The potential for this type of memory in zebrafish remains unexplored even though they are quickly becoming an essential model organism for the study of a variety of human cognitive and mental disorders.

Who cares who calls? Selective responses to the lost calls of socially dominant group members in the white-faced capuchin (Cebus Capucinus).

In many social mammals and birds, soft vocalizations are habitually produced during dispersed moving and foraging, the function being to maintain contact and regulate spacing between group members. In some species, much louder calls are given sporadically by specific individuals when they become separated from the group, or 'lost'. The function of these calls has seldom been specifically tested, particularly among social primates, but is often assumed to involve regaining contact with the group based on a combination of individually distinctive calls and antiphonal responses to them from within the group.