Traditionally, heat damage in forages has been associated primarily with alterations in forage protein quality as a result of Maillard reactions. A Maillard reaction is a heat-induced chemical reaction between protein (amino acids) and sugars. Maillard products produce a range of odors and colors in forages, but generally are poorly characterized nutrients in ruminant nutrition. Terms such as h...

Inter-sexual segregation between habitats or between sites within a habitat is very widespread in sexually dimorphic ungulates. As an explanation, it has been suggested that males, because of their larger forage requirements, are driven from preferred, high quality forage habitats into marginal habitats of lower forage quality but higher forage biomass by female competition (`indirect competiti...

California sea lions increased from approximately 50 000 to 340 000 animals in the last 40 years, and their pups are starving and stranding on beaches in southern California, raising questions about the adequacy of their food supply. We investigated whether the declining sea lion pup weight at San Miguel rookery was associated with changes in abundance and quality of sardine, anchovy, rockfish ...

Diets with low forage concentration may depress feed intake and average daily gain, while diets with high forage concentration may limit feed intake due to rumen filling. Adequate forage level may range from 7% to 14% in ration for feedlot lambs, depending on forage source and ingredient composition. Small amounts of good quality forage may improve growth performance of sheep in the first stage...

Forage quality of orchardgrass and timothy hays can be evaluated from both nutritional and marketing perspectives. From the nutritional perspective it is conditioned by the 1) nutrient concentration, 2) rate of voluntary intake, 3) digestibility and 4) partitioning of metabolized products within the animal. From the marketing perspective, hay destined for urban feed store and Pacific Rim market...

The forage maturation hypothesis (FMH) proposes that ungulate migration is driven by selection for high forage quality. Because quality declines with plant maturation, but intake declines at low biomass, ungulates are predicted to select for intermediate forage biomass to maximize energy intake by following phenological gradients during the growing season. We tested the FMH in the Canadian Rock...

Understanding potential impacts of vegetation change on caribou energetics requires information on varia¬ tions in forage quality among different plant types and over time. We synthesized data on forage quality (nitrogen, neutral detergent fiber and dry matter digestibility) for 10 plant growth forms from existing scientific literature and from field research in the Arctic National Wildlife Ref...

A demonstration was conducted to examine the stored forage yield and stored forage quality of two different hay forage management systems. The forage management systems were a hay harvest only system or a complimentary hayround bale silage harvest system. The hay system harvested bermudagrass forage as hay during the summer when weather conditions allowed, the complimentary system harvested ber...