“…Such symptoms were also observed in experimental studies using cats (Charbonneau et al, 1976), dogs (Mattsson et al, 1981), mice (Inouye et al, 1985; Dietrich et al, 2004); rats (Rocha et al, 1993; Farina et al, 2005), monkeys (Rice, 1996) and zebrafish ( Danio rerio ) (Samson et al, 2001). Although experimental studies on MeHg-exposed animals have shown that behaviors related to visual (visual contrast sensitivity task; Burbacher et al, 2005), cognitive (passive avoidance task; Ferraro et al, 2009) and emotional (depression-like behavior evaluated in the forced swimming test; Onishchenko et al, 2007) functions are also affected by MeHg exposures, movement disorders , consisting mainly of ataxia and loss of balance, have been extensively reported in experimental studies using MeHg-exposed animals (Dietrich et al, 2004, Farina et al, 2005; Lucena et al, 2007) and have been used as an important behavioral parameter to correlate with histological/cellular damage and/or biochemical changes (Franco et al, 2006; Carvalho et al, 2007, Carvalho et al, 2008), as well as to study potential protective/antidotal strategies to counteract MeHg-induced toxicity (Farina et al, 2005; Martins et al, 2009). …”