Working Group Fish Growth Physiology

3R in fish research and aquaculture

The main goal of our working group is to implement the 3Rs (Replace, Reduce and Refine of animal experiments) in fish research and aquaculture. In this way, we want to combine ethical and economic aspects for a future-oriented approach to fish.

In our working group, we have established three main fields. In the first area, we analyse the fillet of adult fish, as the quality allows conclusions to be drawn about the well-being of the animals and to ensure high product quality at the aquaculture location of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In the second area, we investigate the growth of fish larvae in order to find disturbing factors and thus improve the survival rate during rearing. In the third area, we deal with cell culture systems of fish in order to use them as model systems instead of animals. For this reason, our goal is to establish new cell lines of economically important fish species and of fish that are classified as endangered in the IUCN Red List.

Our research group will investigate the following questions using cell biological, histological, molecular biological and physico-chemical methods:

• Establishment of cell cultures from fish tissue e.g. for the investigation of the effects of climate change on cell physiology
• Development of fish larvae: Analysis of similarities and differences in the development of evolutionarily different fish species in aquaculture
• Fish flesh quality: Establishment of sensory, physico-chemical and chemical measurement techniques for the supervision and the comparison of fish fillet in local fish species.

Such knowledge serves as basis for fish culture and could be used as a prognosis for analysing the effects on fish growth caused by stress e.g. non optimal aquaculture conditions.