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PREPARATION OF WHOLE SMALL FISH FOR HISTOLOGICAL EVALUATION
Citation:
Fournie, J W., W. E. Hawkins, R. M. Krol, AND M. J. Wolfe. PREPARATION OF WHOLE SMALL FISH FOR HISTOLOGICAL EVALUATION. 1996, Chapter 31, Gary K. Ostrander (ed.), Techniques in Aquatic Toxicology. CRC Press LLC, Boca Raton, FL, , 577-587, (1996).
Impact/Purpose:
To present procedures and methods covering all aspects of the preparation of fish for histologic examination.
Description:
Toxicologic pathology, which is primarily concerned with chemically-induced structural changes in cells or tissues, depends on the proper histological processing of test specimens. In fishes, histopathological examination is widely recognized as a reliable method for disease diagnosis (Ferguson, 1989) and for assessing acute and chronic effects of exposure to toxicants at the cellular level in both marine and freshwater species (Hinton et al., 1992). Published histological methods are available for fishes in general (Hinton, 1990), for particular species such as the channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus (Grizzle and Rogers, 1976), and striped bass, Morone saxatilis (Groman, 1982), and for salmonids (Yasutake and Wales, 1983). In some cases, custom methods have been developed for specific organs or tissues that are of particular interest. For example, a recent study evaluated several fixation protocols on the liver of the Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar (Speilberg et al., 1993). The studies cited above deal mainly with large fish species. The increased use of small fish in aquatic toxicology, carcinogenicity testing, and biomedical research (Hawkins et al., 1995) also requires that samples are properly processed so that reliable histopathological evaluations can be performed. In this chapter, procedures and methods covering all aspects of the preparation of small fish for histologic examination are presented. The specific protocols presented are from those used at the U.S. EPA, Gulf Ecology Division, Gulf Breeze, Florida, the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and the experimental Pathology Laboratories, Herndon, Virginia.