Showing papers by "Joseph P. Garner published in 2013"
TL;DR: The utility of nest building behavior in laboratory mice as an ethologically relevant indicator of welfare is demonstrated and the methods presented can be successfully used to identify thermal stressors, aggressive cages, sickness, and pain.
Abstract: The minimization and alleviation of suffering has moral and scientific implications. In order to mitigate this negative experience one must be able to identify when an animal is actually in distress. Pain, illness, or distress cannot be managed if unrecognized. Evaluation of pain or illness typically involves the measurement of physiologic and behavioral indicators which are either invasive or not suitable for large scale assessment. The observation of nesting behavior shows promise as the basis of a species appropriate cage-side assessment tool for recognizing distress in mice. Here we demonstrate the utility of nest building behavior in laboratory mice as an ethologically relevant indicator of welfare. The methods presented can be successfully used to identify thermal stressors, aggressive cages, sickness, and pain. Observation of nest building behavior in mouse colonies provides a refinement to health and well-being assessment on a day to day basis.
151 citations
TL;DR: It is hypothesized that nesting material would allow mice to alleviate cold stress by controlling their thermal microenvironment, thus insulating them, reducing heat loss and thermogenic processes, and reducing the need for non-shivering thermogenesis.
124 citations
TL;DR: Postnatal repeated OT administration altered social behavior and resulted in a long-term dysregulation of the HPA axis, highlighting the complex, fine-tuning of the neurobiological mechanisms regulating the development of socialbehavior and suggesting caution in the application of neonatal peptide treatments during early development.
80 citations
TL;DR: Nesting material improved feed efficiency per pup weaned as well as pup weaning weight, and the sparing of energy for thermoregulation of mice given additional nesting material may have been responsible for the improved breeding and growth of offspring.
Abstract: Mice are housed at temperatures (20-26°C) that increase their basal metabolic rates and impose high energy demands to maintain core temperatures. Therefore, energy must be reallocated from other biological processes to increase heat production to offset heat loss. Supplying laboratory mice with nesting material may provide sufficient insulation to reduce heat loss and improve both feed conversion and breeding performance. Naive C57BL/6, BALB/c, and CD-1breeding pairs were provided with bedding alone, or bedding supplemented with either 8g of Enviro-Dri, 8g of Nestlets, for 6 months. Mice provided with either nesting material built more dome-like nests than controls. Nesting material improved feed efficiency per pup weaned as well as pup weaning weight. The breeding index (pups weaned/dam/week) was higher when either nesting material was provided. Thus, the sparing of energy for thermoregulation of mice given additional nesting material may have been responsible for the improved breeding and growth of offspring.
47 citations
TL;DR: Nesting material helps nude mice behaviourally thermoregulate, reducing heat loss to the environment, and this reduction would improve feed conversion as well as breeding performance, and shows that good welfare can be good business and good science.
31 citations
TL;DR: The habitat, sensory biology, and the relevant features of normal Xenopus behavior are reviewed and with those unique features in mind, strategies for effective environmental enrichment are proposed.
18 citations
TL;DR: These results are the first formal test of the hypothesis that birth SR manipulation is adaptive in mammals in terms of grandchildren produced, showing that SR manipulation can explain biased birth SR in general across mammalian species.
Abstract: Population dynamics predicts that on average parents should invest equally in male and female offspring; similarly, the physiology of mammalian sex determination is supposedly stochastic, producing equal numbers of sons and daughters. However, a high quality parent can maximize fitness by biasing their birth sex ratio (SR) to the sex with the greatest potential to disproportionately outperform peers. All SR manipulation theories share a fundamental prediction: grandparents who bias birth SR should produce more grandoffspring via the favored sex. The celebrated examples of biased birth SRs in nature consistent with SR manipulation theories provide compelling circumstantial evidence. However, this prediction has never been directly tested in mammals, primarily because the complete three-generation pedigrees needed to test whether individual favored offspring produce more grandoffspring for the biasing grandparent are essentially impossible to obtain in nature. Three-generation pedigrees were constructed using 90 years of captive breeding records from 198 mammalian species. Male and female grandparents consistently biased their birth SR toward the sex that maximized second-generation success. The most strongly male-biased granddams and grandsires produced respectively 29% and 25% more grandoffspring than non-skewing conspecifics. The sons of the most male-biasing granddams were 2.7 times as fecund as those of granddams with a 50∶50 bias (similar results are seen in grandsires). Daughters of the strongest female-biasing granddams were 1.2 times as fecund as those of non-biasing females (this effect is not seen in grandsires). To our knowledge, these results are the first formal test of the hypothesis that birth SR manipulation is adaptive in mammals in terms of grandchildren produced, showing that SR manipulation can explain biased birth SR in general across mammalian species. These findings also have practical implications: parental control of birth SR has the potential to accelerate genetic loss and risk of extinction within captive populations of endangered species.
18 citations
TL;DR: In this article, female offspring from three socially stressed sows and three control sows were tested at 18 days of age and two piglets received 24 IU of OT intranasally and two pigs received saline as a control treatment.
15 citations
TL;DR: The results confirm that preference studies may be highly sensitive to experimental conditions and appear that a mirror may be used by the animal for social support during periods of perceived threat, however further investigation is warranted.
11 citations
11 citations
TL;DR: It is found that a simple need to gnaw cannot alone explain food grinding, and that a nutritional motivation may also be involved, in that cages with greater average body weights had lower levels of ort production.
Abstract: Some laboratory mice gnaw food pellets without ingesting much of the gnawed material, resulting in the production of waste material called 'orts'. The fact that this food grinding behavior is not seen in all individuals of a particular strain suggests that it might be abnormal, and thus indicate a welfare concern. Furthermore, the increased rate of feed consumption and cage soiling is undesirable from a husbandry perspective. To try to determine possible motivations for the behavior, and identify potential treatments, outbred Crl:CD1(Icr) mice exhibiting food grinding were selected for one of three treatments placed in the feeder: no enrichment, a chewing device, or sunflower seeds. Both enrichment groups showed a significant decrease (P < 0.05) in ort production when compared with baseline measurements, but only mice provided with sunflower seeds maintained the decreased rate of food wastage after the treatment was withdrawn. A relationship between body weight and ort production was also found, in that cages with greater average body weights had lower levels of ort production. This suggests that a simple need to gnaw cannot alone explain food grinding, and that a nutritional motivation may also be involved.
TL;DR: This article proposes epidemiological and ethological field techniques to gather and screen online media as a data source on diverse taxa to provide access to a rich source of untapped knowledge, particularly to study the behavior of understudied species or sporadic behaviors.
Abstract: Many high-priority and high-interest species are challenging to study due to the difficulty in accessing animals and/or obtaining sufficient sample sizes The recent explosion in technology, particularly social media and live webcams available on the Internet, provides new opportunities for behavioral scientists to collect data not just on our own species, as well as new resources for teaching and outreach We discuss here the possibility of exploiting online media as a new source of behavioral data, which we termed ‘video mining’ This article proposes epidemiological and ethological field techniques to gather and screen online media as a data source on diverse taxa This novel method provides access to a rich source of untapped knowledge, particularly to study the behavior of understudied species or sporadic behaviors, but also for teaching or monitoring animals in challenging settings