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Volume 3
Food Science 2019
November 11-12, 2019
Page 15
Food Science and Technology
November 11-12, 2019 | London, UK
3
rd
International Conference on
Applied Food Science Journal
Appl Food Sci J. | Volume 3
A semi-automatic dispenser for solid and liquid food in aquatic facilities
W
e 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
millimetres 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’ behaviour 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.
Biography
Raphaël Candelier is a biophysicist specialized in neuroscience. He has been working for the last 10 years on larval zebrafish, for which he
has developed new ways of recording behaviour and imaging whole-brain activity with single cell-resolution during various tasks. His main
research interests are the multi-scale mechanisms of the sensory-motor feedback loop and the general features of multi-sensory processing.
He has recently started a research project on chemotaxis (i.e. attraction/repulsion of animals with chemical cues) aiming at exploiting the
unique features of zebrafish to reveal general mechanisms of the vertebrate brain.
raphael.candelier@upmc.frRaphaël Candelier
Sorbonne University, France