Statement on the welfare of animals

All applicable international, national and institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. Animal housing was inspected by the James Cook University welfare officer, and ethics approval was granted prior to commencement of this study under the James Cook University Ethics Committee Permit number A2260, conforming strictly to the national regulations set out in the National Health and Medical Research Council (2013) Australian code for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes, 8th edition, under Section 39 of the National Health and Medical Research Council Act, 1992. A superficial, standardised epithelial injury was necessary to answer the research question. Fish were given a single unilateral superficial injury by removal of scales from a predetermined area on either flank of an area no larger than 0.15 cm2. All fish were housed separately to avoid bullying. Handling of all fish briefly with an aquarium hand-held net was crucial for the transferral into and out of the experimental tanks and could not be avoided. Hand-netting was kept to the operational minimum, occurring only once per day in and out of the experimental tanks per individual. Fish were offered food daily after experimentation and fed successfully, demonstrating a rapid return to normal behaviour after brief handling. Anaesthesia was justifiably employed to facilitate rapid photography of all fish and to avoid prolonged aerial exposure. Three fish mortalities occurred during the experimentation period employing 126 fish. All fish were humanely euthanised after sampling using an anaesthetic overdose of 2-phenoxyethanol (1.5 ml/l > 10 min; Neiffer and Stamper 2009) following the approved animal end-point set out in the animal ethics approval. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Data availability

All datasets used to generate the statistical analyses are available from https://doi.org/10.4225/28/5b2c885b32331.