Problems with equating thermal preference with ‘emotional fever’ and sentience: comment on ‘Fish can show emotional fever: stress-induced hyperthermia in zebrafish’ by Rey

Problems with equating thermal preference with ‘emotional fever’ and sentience: comment on ‘Fish can show emotional fever: stress-induced hyperthermia in zebrafish’ by Rey et al. (2015)

Comment to: Rey S, Huntingford FA, Boltanã S, Vargas R, Knowles TG, Mackenzie S. 2015 Fish can show emotional fever: stress-induced hyperthermia in zebrafish. Proc. R. Soc. B 282, 20152266. & 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the origi...

Fish can show emotional fever: stress-induced hyperthermia in zebrafish.

Whether fishes are sentient beings remains an unresolved and controversial question. Among characteristics thought to reflect a low level of sentience in fishes is an inability to show stress-induced hyperthermia (SIH), a transient rise in body temperature shown in response to a variety of stressors. This is a real fever response, so is often referred to as 'emotional fever'. It has been sugges...

Stress induced hyperthermia in zebrafish: a reply to Key et al.

Behavioural fever is a synergic signal amplifying the innate immune response

Behavioural fever, defined as an acute change in thermal preference driven by pathogen recognition, has been reported in a variety of invertebrates and ectothermic vertebrates. It has been suggested, but so far not confirmed, that such changes in thermal regime favour the immune response and thus promote survival. Here, we show that zebrafish display behavioural fever that acts to promote exten...

The Relationship between Vital Spirit and Fevers in the “Canon of Medicine”: A Probable Solution for the Controversy over Stress-Induced Hyperthermia

Based on the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna (980-1037), fever is defined as an abnormal heat ignited in the heart and spreads throughout the body via the arteries (1). Following the Galen theory about fevers (2), Avicenna describes three main types of fevers in relation with the three types of material structures in the body (2). According to the theory of "Natural bodily af-fairs" mentioned in ...