| dc.description.abstract | 1. Aquatic chemical ecology is an important and growing field of research that involves understanding how
organisms perceive and respond to chemical cues in their environment. Research assessing the preference or
avoidance of a water source containing specific chemical cues has increased in popularity in recent years, and a
variety of methods have been described in the scientific literature. Two-current choice flumes have seen the greatest
increase in popularity, perhaps because of their potential to address the broadest range of research questions.
2. Here, we review the literature on two-current choice flumes and show that there is a clear absence of standardized
methodologies that make comparisons across studies difficult. Some of the main issues include turbulent
flows that cause mixing of cues, inappropriate size of choice arenas for the animals, short experiments with
stressed animals, failure to report how experiment and researcher biases were eliminated, general underreporting
of methodological details, underutilization of collected data and inappropriate data analyses.
3. In this review, we present best practice guidelines on how to build, test and use two-current choice flumes to
measure the behavioural responses of aquatic animals to chemical cues, and provide blueprints for flume construction.
The guidelines include steps that can be taken to avoid problems commonly encountered when using
two-current choice flumes and analysing the resulting data.
4. This review provides a set of standards that should be followed to ensure data quality, transparency and replicability
in future studies in this field. | nb_NO |
