Adult vertebrate behavioural aquatic toxicology: Reliability and validity

• Major increase in understanding of aquatic vertebrate behaviour will benefit toxicologists wishing to link behaviour and physiology.
• Caution must be taken to ensure reliability and validity of tests being developed if data are to be useful.
• This review makes some suggestions and recommendations that may help to improve this field as it begins to emerge.

Current advances in the ability to assay adult aquatic vertebrate behaviour are potentially very useful to aquatic toxicologists wishing to characterise the effects of pollutants on behaviour, cognition or neurodevelopment. This review considers two specific challenges faced by researchers wishing to exploit these technologies: maximising reliability and validity. It will suggest two behavioural procedures, with the potential for automation and high-throughput implementation, which can be used to measure social cohesion and anxiety, two areas of interest in behavioural aquatic toxicology. In addition, the review will make recommendations about how these procedures (and others) could be carried out to maximise reliability and validity.