A long term goal of the laboratory is to achieve in toto live cell imaging of the collective cellular response to muscle tissue injury. In an attempt to attain this goal, we have developed zebrafish models of tissue injury where the optical accessibility of the larvae allows the application of non-invasive techniques to assay repair in real time. Transgenic zebrafish reporter lines fluorescently tagging wound- present cellular components were systematically subject to acute injury, enabling the location and response dynamics of individual wound-occupying cells to be correlated to the stem cell compartment during muscle repair. I will present data on these studies, with particular emphasis on the role of the innate immune response in coordinating stem cell mediated repair, which we show plays an essential role at distinct phase of the regenerative process.