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In the past few decades, aquatic animals have become popular model organisms in biology, spurring a growing need for establishing aquatic facilities. Zebrafish are widely studied and relatively easy to culture using commercial systems. However, a challenging aspect of maintaining aquatic facilities is animal feeding, which is both time- and resource-consuming. We have developed an open-source fully automatic daily feeding system, Zebrafish Automatic Feeder (ZAF). ZAF is reliable, provides a standardized amount of food to every tank, is cost-efficient and easy to build. The advanced version, ZAF+, allows for the precise control of food distribution as a function of fish density per tank, and has a user-friendly interface. Both ZAF and ZAF+ are adaptable to any laboratory environment and facilitate the implementation of aquatic colonies. Here, we provide all blueprints and instructions for building the mechanics, electronics, fluidics, as well as to setup the control software and its user-friendly graphical interface. Importantly, the design is modular and can be scaled to meet different user needs. Furthermore, our results show that ZAF and ZAF+ do not adversely affect zebrafish culture, enabling fully automatic feeding for any aquatic facility.

Recent developments in Oblique Plane Microscopy (OPM) have shown that it can achieve high spatio-temporal resolution. Here we describe a single objective light-sheet microscope based on oblique plane illumination that achieves: (i) large field of view and high-resolution imaging via a custom remote focusing objective; (ii) fast volumetric imaging by means of light-sheet stabilised stage scanning – a novel scanning modality that extends the imaging volume without compromising imaging speed nor quality; (iii) multi-view imaging by alternating the orientation of light-sheet illumination and detection to improve the image quality on large samples; (iv) simpler design and ergonomics by remote placement of coverslips to allow inverted imaging, enabling imaging across scales in a high-throughput format. Overall, we achieved a resolution of 450 nm laterally and 2 μm axially and a field of view of 3000 μm × 800 μm × 300 μm. We demonstrate the speed, field of view, resolution and versatility of our novel instrument by imaging various systems, including zebrafish whole brain activity, Drosophila egg chamber development, and zebrafish development – up to nine embryos simultaneously.