To the casual observer, the fish doesn’t look like much. It certainly doesn’t look like a zebra, despite its name. It’s an unassuming minnow, small, pale and darting.
But to Eric Horstick and his students at West Virginia University, it offers an incomparable, unobstructed view of the mysteries of human brains and behaviors.
An associate professor of biology at the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, Horstick studies the zebrafish, a freshwater fish native to South Asia but sold in pet stores around the world thanks to its hardiness and low cost of care.
Geneticists love zebrafish because they reproduce so quickly and share around 70% of their genes with humans.
For Horstick, however, it’s more than that. He said he believes zebrafish and similar species can help answer fundamental questions of neuroscience.