
Victoria A. BraithwaitePennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Ecosystem Science and Management
Victoria A. Braithwaite
D.Phil.
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150
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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October 2007 - present
Publications
Publications (150)
Trace conditioning involves the pairing of a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS), followed by a short interval with a motivationally significant unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Recently, trace conditioning has been proposed as a test for animal consciousness due to its correlation in humans with subjective report of the CS–UCS connection. We argue that...
Information on fish preference for environmental conditions can be a useful tool to offer them what they want, an important requirement for welfare purposes. Giving that such an approach deals with psychological states of the fish, we investigated whether psychological stress affects fish preference. In this study, we found that the aversive condit...
Animals that are reared in constant, unchanging environments typically develop abnormal behavioural and cognitive abilities that often result in poor welfare. It is now recognized that the addition of variability through physical and social enrichment has many positive effects for captive populations of fish; these include neural stimulation, impro...
Environmental enrichment is used extensively to improve the welfare of animals in captivity, however, the importance of physical exercise as enrichment is only now coming to light. A key question in assessing the welfare of animals in captivity is, 'What do animals want?' In order to answer this question fully, it is important to determine the role...
Stressful experiences, whether encountered at certain stages of development or throughout life, can have a profound impact on an animal’s future behavior. How these stressors affect the animal can be influenced by the future environments an animal finds itself in. If an animal experiences an environment that matches its stressful rearing environmen...
Populations that have recently diverged offer a powerful model for studying evolution. Ecological differences are expected to generate divergent selection on multiple traits, including neurobiological ones. Animals must detect, process, and act on information from their surroundings and the form of this information can be highly dependent on the en...
There is a growing need to understand how our current interactions and practices influence fish welfare and wellbeing. Particularly given the increasing use of fish both as model organisms in research, for example zebrafish used in biomedical experiments, and also in terms of food production in aquaculture, where we now rear and harvest several dif...
Felt emotional states are at the very heart of many concerns about animal welfare. However, some scholars express doubt that animals are able to have such experiences, and there is much debate about what types of evidence can be used to draw inferences regarding such feelings in animals. The objective of this review is to critically examine inferen...
Many factors have been associated with the decline of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) throughout their native range including acidification and competition with brown trout (Salmo trutta), an introduced species. We observed the behavior of wild, adult brook trout and brown trout (alone and in combination) within study reaches that were manipula...
To test whether swimming skills can be improved by exposure to structurally complex environments, juvenile rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss were reared in either physically enriched or plain tanks for 2 months and were then screened to test their ability to swim along a channel while avoiding obstructions. The results show that even a relatively s...
Exposure to chronic stress during adolescence can shape behaviour, cognition and physiology in adulthood, but the consequences of these long-term changes remain unclear. Prior studies reporting altered performance following exposure to stress in adolescence have generally interpreted lasting changes as impairments. However, we have recently shown t...
The ways in which challenging environments during development shape the
brain and behaviour are increasingly being addressed. To date, studies typically
consider only single variables, but the real world ismore complex.Many factors
simultaneously affect the brain and behaviour, and whether these work independently
or interact remains untested. To a...
Differences in behaviours between juveniles from different treatments in the novel tank diving test. (a) Latency to top, (b) Entries in top/bottom, (c) Time in top and (d) Log10 Average top entry duration. Summary of behaviours measured for juvenile fish in the novel tank diving test. Adapted from Cachat et al. [34]. Comparison of behaviours in juv...
HIGHLIGHTS This study tested the effects of adolescent-stress on adult learning and memory.
Adolescent-stressed rats had enhanced reversal learning compared to unstressed rats.
Adolescent-stress exposure made working memory more vulnerable to disturbance.
Adolescent-stress did not affect adult associative learning or reference memory.
Exposure to a...
Experience can help animals adapt their behaviour to fit the environment or conditions that they find themselves in. Understanding how and when experience affects behaviour is important for the animals we rear in captivity. This is particularly true when we rear animals with the intent of releasing them into the wild as part of population rehabilit...
Spatial abilities allow animals to retain and cognitively manipulate information about their spatial environment and are dependent upon neural structures that mature during adolescence. Exposure to stress in adolescence is thought to disrupt neural maturation, possibly compromising cognitive processes later in life. We examined whether exposure to...
In variable environments, animals can learn to alter their behavior to adjust to changes. Sometimes, however, this learning ability can be impaired. For example, challenges in the social or physical environment can trigger physiological responses that compromise an individual's capacity to learn and these can prevent the animal from modifying its b...
Adolescent exposure to adverse environmental conditions can cause lasting changes in behaviour, cognition and physiology. One explanation for why such changes occur is that they allow organisms to adjust aspects of their phenotype to enhance function in an unfavourable environment. This concept has been investigated for stress during gestation (e.g...
Recently we have shown that adult rats exposed to chronic stress during adolescence increase foraging performance in high-threat conditions by 43% compared to rats reared without stress. Our findings suggest that stress during adolescence can prepare rats to better function under future threat, which supports hypotheses describing an adaptive role...
Many decisions in the lives of animals and humans require a fine balance between the exploration of different options and the exploitation of their rewards. Do you buy the advertised car, or do you test drive different models? Do you continue feeding from the current patch of flowers, or do you fly off to another one? Do you marry your current part...
The capacity for specialization and radiation make fish an excellent group in which to investigate the depth and variety of animal cognition. Even though early observations of fish using tools predates the discovery of tool use in chimpanzees, fish cognition has historically been somewhat overlooked. However, a recent surge of interest is now provi...
Living in challenging environments can influence the behavior of animals in a number of ways. For instance, populations of prey fish that experience frequent, nonlethal interactions with predators have a high proportion of individuals that express greater reaction to risk and increased activity and exploration-collectively known as temperament trai...
Human cooperation is often based on reputation gained from previous interactions with third parties. Such reputation can be built on generous or punitive actions, and both, one's own reputation and the reputation of others have been shown to influence decision making in experimental games that control for confounding variables. Here we test how rep...
Farming fish for human consumption continues to expand as an industry and, with this increasing interaction with captive fish populations, there is now a growing interest in determining how to create good welfare for the fish we farm. This article summarises recent advances in our understanding of pain and stress responses in fish and how these rel...
An assessment of consciousness in nonverbal animals requires a framework for research that extends testing methods beyond subjective report. This chapter proposes a working definition of consciousness in terms of temporal representation that provides the critical link between internal phenomenology and external behavior and neural structure. Our cl...
This study describes how three individual fish, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua L.), developed a novel behaviour and learnt to use a dorsally attached external tag to activate a self-feeder. This behaviour was repeated up to several hundred times, and over time these fish fine-tuned the behaviour and made a series of goal-directed coordinated movements...
Different kinds of experience during early life can play a significant role in the development of an animal's behavioural phenotype. In natural contexts, this influences behaviours from anti-predator responses to navigation abilities. By contrast, for animals reared in captive environments, the homogeneous nature of their experience tends to reduce...
Background/Question/Methods
Previous work has shown that the sex of an animal can influence how it learns to navigate around an environment. In mammals, females often show a preference for remembering the location of a resource based on the landmarks she encounters en route, whereas males tend to prefer more egocentric strategies that rely upon w...
Animals that experience adverse events in early life often have life-long changes to their physiology and behavior. Long-term effects of stress during early life have been studied extensively, but less attention has been given to the consequences of negative experiences solely during the adolescent phase. Adolescence is a particularly sensitive per...
Aluminum (Al) toxicity occurs frequently in natural aquatic ecosystems as a result of acid deposition and natural weathering processes. Detrimental effects of Al toxicity on aquatic organisms are well known and can have consequences for survival. Fish exposed to Al in low pH waters will experience physiological and neuroendocrine changes that disru...
Most fishes experiencing challenging environments are able to adjust and adapt their physiology and behaviour to help them cope more effectively. Much of this flexibility is supported and influenced by cognition and neural plasticity. The understanding of fish cognition and the role played by different regions of the brain has improved significantl...
1. Natural selection can generate correlated suites of phenotypic traits by acting independently on physiological and behavioural characters or on mechanisms that exert pleiotropic actions.
2. Current theory, supported by artificial selection studies, suggests that physiological and behavioural stress responses are at least partially under genetic...
The ways in which fish use space in nature are described, distinguishing between movements within a home range, dispersal and directed migration, as are the mechanisms that determine how fish use space. The external stimuli to which fish respond, how they use these cues to find their way around and the role of hormones in migration are also covered...
It is only in the last decade that cutaneous, polymodal nociceptors have been described for fish. Electrophysiological recordings from trigeminal nerve in rainbow trout has revealed that the physiological properties of fish nociceptors are similar to those described for birds and mammals. The receptors were found to respond to mechanical pressure,...
Learning and memory enable animals to adapt their behavior to suit their current situation – thus learning and memory promote flexible behavior. For many years, it was believed that fish were limited to fairly basic learning and memory abilities – making simple associations between a particular kind of action and an outcome. A wealth of evidence no...
Many parasites with complex life cycles are known to modify their host phenotype to enhance transmission from the intermediate host to the definitive host. Several earlier studies explored these effects in acanthocephalan and trematode parasites, especially in aquatic ecosystems; however, much less is known about parasite‐mediated alterations of ho...
Fish can use a variety of features and information in their environment to enable them to construct maps, navigate to novel locations, return to home ranges if displaced or complete long distance migrations. While there are clear differences in the strategies and spatial behaviors used by different species, we also find that within species there ar...
The process of stock enhancement, where large numbers of fish are reared and then released, is an increasingly common practice aimed at improving the numbers of fish in rivers, lakes and along coasts. Stock enhancement practices, however, raise a number of welfare issues both for fish that are reared within captivity, and for the local populations...
Mature female Atlantic salmon Salmo salar were given intraperitoneal cortisol implants 1 week prior to stripping to examine the influence of simulated maternal stress on offspring boldness and social dominance. Behavioural tests originally designed to investigate stress responsiveness and coping styles in salmonids (i.e. feeding in isolation, domin...
In this study we evaluated Pavlovian conditioned food anticipatory behaviour as a potential indicator for stress in groups of Atlantic salmon, and compared this with the physiological stress responses of cortisol excretion into water and hyper-consumption of oxygen. We hypothesised that environmental stress would result in reduced feeding motivatio...
The environment can play an important role in shaping how an animal behaves, and how well the animal performs in a particular
environment can be influenced by early experiences. The tradition of releasing captive-reared juveniles into the wild in an
effort to strengthen wild fish populations has often had little success owing to high post-release m...
Nutrient-rich, upwelling marine areas with high productivity often produce sediments
dominated by organic-rich mud. Here, intense decay processes create hypoxic conditions with high
concentrations of hydrogen sulphide and methane in the muddy surface layers. Such environments
are inhospitable to most forms of life and those organisms that can survi...
Increasing public concern for the welfare of fish species that human beings use and exploit has highlighted the need for better understanding of the cognitive status of fish and of their ability to experience negative emotions such as pain and fear. Moreover, studying emotion and cognition in fish species broadens our scientific understanding of ho...
Two temperament traits, tendency to explore and activity level, were measured in a tropical poeciliid fish, the Panamanian bishop Brachyrhaphis episcopi. Open-field arena tests were used to quantify how predation pressure shapes activity levels and exploratory behaviours. Fish behaviour differed between high and low-predation populations. Fish that...
This chapter can be accessed using the following link:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=grH8AV6lRjwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA166&dq=The+role+of+learning+in+fish+orientation&ots=Eoqa7EEDtb&sig=OiRRpwB7e6uuJfmaRVWNnfH3O88#v=onepage&q=The%20role%20of%20learning%20in%20fish%20orientation&f=false
Aggression is often positively correlated with other behavioural traits such as boldness and activity levels. Comparisons across populations can help to determine factors that promote the evolution of such traits. We quantified these behaviours by testing the responses of wild-caught poeciliid fish, Brachyrhaphis episcopi, to mirror image stimuli....
Captive birds and mammals reared in enriched rearing environments have been shown to behave more flexibly compared to animals reared in impoverished or plain environments. Recent evidence has shown that this is also true for fish; enrichment promotes faster recovery after a stressful experience, a higher propensity for exploration of novel areas an...
Since the collapse of the pelagic fisheries off southwest Africa in the late 1960s, jellyfish biomass has increased and the
structure of the Benguelan fish community has shifted, making the bearded goby (Sufflogobius bibarbatus) the new predominant prey species. Despite increased predation pressure and a harsh environment, the gobies are thriving....
Animal temperament describes behavioural differences between individuals that are consistent across time and contexts. Variation in animal temperament is rapidly gaining interest and attention within behavioural and evolutionary ecology. If we are to understand the causes and consequences of temperament variation within and between populations we n...
As the harvesting of fish through commercial fisheries becomes both harder and less economically viable, the world is becoming increasingly dependent on aquaculture to provide fish for human consumption. The closely related activity of stock enhancement, whereby large numbers of fish are reared and then released, is a common practice aimed at incre...
The importance of visual landmarks during homing in pigeons (Columba livia) remains a contentious issue. Three experiments which explore the role of visual landmarks at release sites are reported here. The effects of releasing homing pigeons after a 5-minute period in either a clear or an opaque sided release box were investigated. In the clear sid...
In this study, we demonstrate how an event that is initially frightening to Atlantic salmon is turned to a positive stimulus through habituation and associative learning. The study was carried out in four commercial sized tanks (5m3) with near industry densities (>550 fish, 16kgm−3), using a delay conditioning procedure with an aversive flashing li...
Dempson, J. B., Braithwaite, V. A., Doherty, D., and Power, M. 2010. Stable isotope analysis of marine feeding signatures
of Atlantic salmon in the North Atlantic. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67: 52–61.Differences in the marine feeding of three geographically distinct populations of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in the North Atlantic (Conne R...
To determine whether enhancing the survival of new recruits is a sensible target for the restorative management of depleted coral-reef fish populations, settlement-stage ambon damsel fish Pomacentrus amboinensis were captured, tagged and then either released immediately onto small artificial reefs or held in aquaria for 1 week prior to release. Hol...
Although interest in fish welfare is growing, little research has addressed the welfare of laboratory or ornamental fish. Our aim here was to evaluate the effects of handling fish with a scoop, where the fish remained submerged in water, compared to handling with a net. We investigated the effect of the scoop vs. a dip-net in three different specie...
Some settlement-stage larval fish appear to be attracted to reef sound and may, therefore, use acoustic cues when orientating towards their settlement site. However, all work on the in situ response of coral reef fish larvae to sound in acoustic playback experiments has been carried out in the same location (Lizard Island, the Great Barrier Reef),...
The egg nest of male three-spined sticklebacks Gasterosteus aculeatus is constructed with a glue-like secretion that this study demonstrates has antimicrobial properties. Glue collected from reproductively active males decreased the growth rate of bacteria and opportunistic fungi, and eggs were more likely to mature and hatch after exposure to thei...
Populations of three-spined sticklebacks Gasterosteus aculeatus originating from contrasting habitats were studied to determine if habitat can affect the ability to combine spatial cues. Previous work has shown that different species combine spatial cues in different ways, and this study showed these differences also arose within a species: all fis...
Increasing evidence suggests that cognitive function is under selection in diverse taxa and that this results in different
cognitive abilities in taxa experiencing different selective environments. For example, species inhabiting spatially complex
environments might be expected to have good spatial learning ability. We investigated whether local ha...
Both premating and postmating barriers to gene flow can contribute to reproductive isolation but the relative role of these factors, particularly in the early stages of speciation, is not well understood. Evidence suggests that factors contributing to assortative mating and, thus, the development and maintenance of divergent species, can be ecology...
1. There is growing interest in the causes and consequences of animal temperaments. Temperament behaviours often have heritable components, but ecological variables can also affect them. Numerous variables are likely to differ between habitats, and these may interact to influence temperament behaviours. 2. Temperament behaviours may be correlated w...
Learning and memory enable animals to adjust their behaviour in variable environments. Not all habitats vary to the same extent, and thus different environments can affect learning and memory in different ways. Habitat stability is one of numerous environmental variables proposed to influence what animals learn, but it is unlikely to act alone. To...
In this review, we explore a variety of techniques that are currently available to investigate the welfare of non-human animals (referred to from now on as animals) with a particular focus on studies of animal cognition. We consider some of the more traditional measures of animal welfare: biological function, physiology and inference, and discuss d...
The capacity for specialization and radiation make fish an excellent group in which to investigate the depth and variety of animal cognition. Even though early observations of fish using tools predates the discovery of tool use in chimpanzees, fish cognition has historically been somewhat overlooked. However, a recent surge of interest is now provi...
Fishes are by far the most species-rich vertebrate taxon, and it is also the vertebrate group with the most strikingly diverse repertoire of behaviours and behavioural adaptations. As such, they provide us with many opportunities to explore the fascinating complexities of animal behaviour. Central questions addressed in this book include: How do se...
The boldness of individual Brachyrhaphis episcopi, collected from regions of high and low predation, was investigated using two independent assays: (1) the time to emerge from cover and (2) the propensity to leave shoal mates and investigate a novel object. A strong correlation between the two assays was revealed such that fish that emerged from sh...
Consistent differences in human behaviour are often explained with reference to personality traits. Recent evidence suggests
that similar traits are widespread across the entire animal kingdom and that they may have substantial fitness consequences.
One of the major components of personality is the shyness–boldness continuum. Little is known about...
Animals that undergo a habitat shift face a number of challenges as they move between habitats; for example, they may encounter new predator species and may be vulnerable as they adapt to their new surroundings. An ability to adapt quickly to the new environment is likely to influence post-transition survival, and an understanding of the developmen...
The welfare of fish is a topic of increasing debate touching on a number of complex scientific and ethical issues and constructive dialogue between groups with differing approaches to the topic requires mutual understanding from both perspectives. In a recent review aimed at stimulating debate on this topic, Arlinghaus et al. (2007) explore the que...
Cerebral lateralization refers to the lateralized partitioning of cognitive function in either hemisphere of the brain. Using a standard detour test, we investigated lateralized behaviour in wild-caught, female poeciliid fish, Brachyraphis (=Brachyrhaphis) episcopi, from high- and low-predation areas. Wild fish were bred and their offspring reared...
There is now compelling evidence that teleost fish possess similar nociceptive processing systems to those found in terrestrial vertebrates. Noxious stimulation of these nociceptors--specialised pain receptors -in the skin around the snout of fish generates neural activity that can be electrophysiologically recorded, and induces a number of behavio...