Development of social behaviour in young zebrafish

15 Adult zebrafish are robustly social animals whereas larva is not. We designed an 16 assay to determine at what stage of development zebrafish begin to interact with and 17 prefer other fish. One week old zebrafish do not show significant social preference 18 whereas most 3 weeks old zebrafish strongly prefer to remain in a compartment where 19 they can view conspecifics. However, for some individuals, the presence of 20 conspecifics drives avoidance instead of attraction. Social preference is dependent on 21 vision and requires viewing fish of a similar age/size. In addition, over the same 1–3 22 weeks period larval zebrafish increasingly tend to coordinate their movements, a 23 simple form of social interaction. Finally, social preference and coupled interactions 24 are differentially modified by an NMDAR antagonist and acute exposure to ethanol, 25 both of which are known to alter social behavior in adult zebrafish. 26 27 . CC-BY 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/017863 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Apr. 10, 2015;