Conducting experiments with live animals poses a series of ethical concerns that have pushed researchers to develop mathematical models of animal behavior that could at least partially reduce the need for such experiments.
In their new study, published in Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics (special issue on Modelling collective motion across scales), our PhD student Mohammad Tuqan and Professor Maurizio Porfiri proposed a model to study the effect of caffeine administration on the social behavior of a group of zebrafish.
Read the full paper “Mathematical modeling of zebrafish social behavior in response to acute caffeine administration” here.
Image credit: Frontiers/Mohammad Tuqan and Maurizio Porfiri.