Unpredictable chronic stress redistributes novelty-evoked exploratory space use and yields method-dependent identification of resilient-like archetypes in zebrafish

Unpredictable chronic stress in adult zebrafish redistributes novelty-evoked exploratory space, shifting higher-exploration occupancy from 55.1% to 24.7% within a continuous behavioural architecture.

• Why it matters: Resilience after chronic stress is hard to identify because post-stress behaviour is multidimensional and classification varies with the analytical method.
• What they did: In 178 adult zebrafish from four cohorts, novelty exploration was quantified in the Novel Tank Test (distance travelled, line crossings, upper-zone entries, upper-zone time) and robustly normalised to control distributions; PCA and weighted k-nearest-neighbour Louvain were compared with null-model inference and resampling.
• The result: UCS significantly altered exploratory space use (PERMANOVA: F(1,173) = 8.10, R2 = 0.0423, p = 0.0016) without detectable changes in dispersion or global correlation, and resilient-like assignments varied widely (9–45) across five frameworks.

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