Adaptation Mechanisms of Small Ruminants to Environmental Heat Stress

Psychological Adaptation To Heat Stress

By Ralph A. Vernacchia, Ph.D., and Sylvia Veit-Hartley, B.A. Center for Performance Enhancement, Western Washington University This excellent work by Vernacchia and Veit-Hartley was presented at the Coaching Education Level III in December, 1998. It not only shows the quality of the authors’ research and writing, but also the what one might fi nd at a Level III seminar. Both authors are to be c...

Water Stress in Small Ruminants

Environmental Attributes to Respiratory Diseases of Small Ruminants

Respiratory diseases are the major disease crisis in small ruminants. A number of pathogenic microorganisms have been implicated in the development of respiratory disease but the importance of environmental factors in the initiation and progress of disease can never be overemphasized. They irritate the respiratory tree producing stress in the microenvironment causing a decline in the immune sta...

Mechanisms of Adaptation to Periodic Environmental Change

Despite Darwin’s pluralistic view that “natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification” (Darwin, 1872) (quoted in (Lewontin and Gould, 1979)), subsequent major developments in evolutionary biology such as the theories of natural selection, the modern synthesis, and molecular neo-darwinism have biased scientific explanations of evolution towards gene-centric the...

Metabolic and hormonal acclimation to heat stress in domesticated ruminants.

Environmentally induced periods of heat stress decrease productivity with devastating economic consequences to global animal agriculture. Heat stress can be defined as a physiological condition when the core body temperature of a given species exceeds its range specified for normal activity, which results from a total heat load (internal production and environment) exceeding the capacity for he...