Assessing Startle Responses and Their Habituation in Adult Zebrafish

Zebrafish is rapidly becoming a popular model species for neurobehavioral and psychopharmacological research. The startle response represents the instinctive, evolutionarily conserved reaction of an organism to novel unexpected and/or aversive stimuli. While startle testing is a well-established assay to study anxiety-like behaviors in different species, screening of the startle response and its habituation in zebrafish is also an important direction of translational biomedical research. Complementing rich literature on zebrafish startle, this chapter outlines a brief and simple protocol to assess the tapping-induced startle response and its inter- and intra-trial habituation in adult zebrafish.