ZAF, the first open source fully automated feeder for aquatic facilities

Abstract

In the past few decades, aquatic animals have become popular model organisms in biology, spurring a growing need for establishing aquatic facilities. Zebrafish are widely studied and relatively easy to culture using commercial systems. However, a challenging aspect of maintaining aquatic facilities is animal feeding, which is both time- and resourceconsuming. We have developed an open-source fully automatic daily feeding system, Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF). ZAF is reliable, provides a standardized amount of food to every tank, is cost-efficient and easy to build. The advanced version, ZAF+, allows for the precise control of food distribution as a function of fish density per tank, and has a user-friendly interface. Both ZAF and ZAF+ are adaptable to any laboratory environment and facilitate the implementation of aquatic colonies. Here we provide all blueprints and instructions for building the mechanics, electronics, fluidics, as well as to setup the control software and its user-friendly graphical interface. Importantly, the design is modular and can be scaled to meet different user needs. Furthermore, our results show that ZAF and ZAF+ do not adversely affect zebrafish culture, enabling fully automatic feeding for any aquatic facility.

Zebrahub – Multimodal Zebrafish Developmental Atlas Reveals the State-Transition Dynamics of Late-Vertebrate Pluripotent Axial Progenitors

“…The care and experimental procedures for zebrafish were conducted in compliance with the protocols approved by the institutional animal care and use committee at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The fish were bred and maintained at 28.5°C and were fed three times per day using an automatic feeder 57 . Embryos were raised at 28.5°C and staged based on hours post fertilization (hpf), with the number of somites used as temporal landmarks 58 during somitogenesis.…”

An automated feeding system for the African killifish reveals effects of dietary restriction on lifespan and allows scalable assessment of associative learning

“…Automated feeders have been developed for fish, but they are rarely used due to their imprecision (e.g., hobbyist feeding systems) or prohibitive costs (e.g., scientific-grade feeding systems, such as Tritone from Tecniplast). While systems developed for zebrafish have solved some of these constraints (Doyle et al, 2017; Lange et al, 2021), they are either not scalable to hundreds of animals simultaneously being fed or cannot easily be added onto commercial water systems. Thus, there is still a need for high precision and programmable feeders compatible with commonly used water systems.…”

“…While there are still areas for optimization, including improved battery life and a simplified user interface, the performance of our automated feeding system is beyond that of manual feeding or several other automated feeding systems (Doyle et al, 2017; Manabe et al, 2013; Yang et al, 2019) in terms of combining precise amount of food dropped, modularity, and scalability. Compared to other recently developed scalable designs (Lange et al, 2021), our automated feeders can be added to any tank, including tanks from commercial water systems, allowing flexibility in experimental design.…”

Lipid-Based Transfection of Zebrafish Embryos: A Robust Protocol for Nucleic Acid Delivery in Zebrafish

“…Care and experimental procedures for zebrafish adhere to the protocols approved by the institutional animal care and use committee at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The fish were bred and maintained at 28°C and were fed thrice daily using an automatic feeder (Lange et al, 2021). Embryos were collected 15 minutes (min) after breeding.…”