Meeting Abstract
Aquatic chemical ecology is an important and growing research field 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. However, there is a clear absence of standardised methodologies, which makes comparisons across studies difficult. Some methodological problems occurring in the literature include turbulent flows causing mixing of cues, inappropriate size of choice arenas for the animals, short experiments with stressed animals, failure to report how observation- and researcher-biases were eliminated, general underreporting of methodological details, and underutilisation of collected data. We propose 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. The guidelines include steps that can be taken to avoid problems commonly encountered when using two-current choice flumes. Our aim is to provide a set of standards that will ensure data quality, transparency, and replicability in future studies in this field.
