Miscellaneous software:
New: Updated 3.rd version of the free open-source software for respirometry of resting aquactic animals AquaResp3® dated March 5.th 2019 is now available from www.quaresp.com
No dongles, no buggy Bluetooth O2-instruments, no nonsense - if you have a 1 - 4 channel Firesting or 1 or 4 channel PreSens oxygen meter, you only need to purchase a digital relay/switch for about 70 € and you are in business.
Why pay thousands of € for software to run AUTOmated RESPirometry when you can use AquaResp for free?
A version for swimming respirometry will also be available ASAP - a prototype is currently tested.
Tracking of fish:
SwisTrack - powerful open source software (and hence free) for tracking fish (individuals or multiple), robots or other objects on-line in real-time using a USB or FireWire camera as input - or from a videofile for post-experimental analyses. The software is rather advanced and permits on-line transfer of the coordinates via TCP/IP directly to MathLab or LabView - which can be programmed to feed-back on the experiment depending on the animals behaviour. Several universities are currently involved in writing a manual and describing a few examples of how the software can be used for determining temperature preference of fish, tracking the tail of a swimming fish for tail beat frequency analysis and relative movement of the fish through the water etc.
Swistrack is developed by University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
More info concerning SwisTrack
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are currently working on a project tracking a reflective bead or pearl mounted on the peduncle of swimming fish - seabream. With SwisTrack it is possible on-line to track the x & y co-ordinates of the pearl and hence in real-time calculate the tail beat frequency and the fish swimming velocity relative to the water velocity. More details here later:
The sequence is aquired with a regular ccd camera and recorded on a sony DV handycam with the signal passing through a frame counter. The sequence was tranferred to aPC via FireWire and with the aid of Adobe Premiere each frame was spilt in individual fields - hence the sequence is 50 fields or images per second. The counter show hours : min : seconds : frame - bewtween seconds and frames is either a . or a : indicating the first or second field of the frame. The sequence look "jumpy" because every other image is one pixel line above or below the next due to the frame splitting.
The swim tunnel / respirometer used for this sequence is an Original Steffensen Research Swim Tunnel Respirometer that's not commercially available.
The sequence readable in SwisTrack (DivX) can be downloaded here: (To download - right click and use "save target as")
Updated July 2019