Continuing on from yesterday’s post about the personality testing for boldness, today I made a time-lapse video from one of the sessions to get a quick overview of the actual running of the experiment. For most experiments I work with 40-64 fish per batch and potentially run multiple batches. Therefore, to be able to test all fish on the same day I test 8 fish simultaneously in 8 separate lanes for one hour and run 8 consecutive sessions in a row.

In practical terms, testing a whole batch of fish in this task takes about one full 10 hour day for each testing day. Each separate session starts with about 5min to prepare the camera’s, fill-in the datasheets, clean the experimental tanks, to get the fish from their housing tanks, and to let them habituate to the holding cups. Then it’s a 55min wait until the end of the session and the start of the next one. This short 39sec time-lapse shows the running of one full boldness session and the start of the next one (totalling about 80min).