The Mason Lab has been discovering that good welfare is sexually attractive, first in mink (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24282547/), then in mice (https://youtu.be/TGRlnf1kcHM), and now in fish!
PhD student Michele Lavery worked with zebrafish, a widely used lab species. In standardized mate choice tests, males raised in high quality, well-resourced tanks containing plants and gravel attracted more female attention than less lucky males raised in conventional small barren tanks. Over the coming year the Mason Lab hopes to investigate why that is.
The invited paper is part of Applied Animal Behaviour Science’s 50th anniversary special edition. Read the new zebrafish paper here: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0168-1591(25)00101-7
