A study was undertaken to test the effect of 2 commercially available probiotics on the production efficiency of broiler chickens hatched from the same breeder flock at 3 different ages (28, 43, and 57 wk). At each of the 3 breeder flock ages, 1,600 broiler chickens were hatched and randomly allocated to 1 of 4 treatments: 1) no probiotics (control), 2) probiotic 1 administered in the drinking ...

Recently, new empirical research of flocking behavior has been accumulated. Scale-free proportion has revealed how a flock can appear to behave as if it has one mind and body. The notion of scale-free proportion implies that the correlated domain within a flock is not constant size, but is proportional to flock size. Scale-free proportion can be explained by previous models, such as BOIDS based...

BACKGROUND Prevention and control of ovine enzootic abortion (OEA) can be achieved by application of a live vaccine. In this study, five sheep flocks with different vaccination and infection status were serologically tested using a competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (cELISA) specific for Chlamydophila (Cp.) abortus over a two-year time period. RESULTS Sheep in Flock A with recent O...

We show that an elation generalised quadrangle which has p + 1 lines on each point, for some prime p, is classical or arises from a flock of a quadratic cone (i.e., is a flock quadrangle).

We prove that the elation groups of a certain infinite family of Roman generalized quadrangles are not isomorphic to those of associated flock generalized quadrangles.

Parrots in captivity are known for their ability to vocally imitate humans and recently it has been shown that wild-living orange-fronted conures are able to immediately imitate other individuals' contact calls. The function of this exceptional ability to imitate remains unclear. However, orange-fronted conures live in fission-fusion flocks where they encounter many different individuals every ...

This article is about finite commutative semifields that are of rank 2 over their nucleus, the largest subset of elements that is a finite field. These semifields have a direct correspondence to certain flocks of the quadratic cone in PG(3, q) and to certain ovoids of the parabolic space Q(4, q). We shall consider these links, the known examples and non-existence results. 1 Semifields A finite ...

In societies that make collective decisions through leadership, a fundamental question concerns the individual attributes that allow certain group members to assume leadership roles over others. Homing pigeons form transitive leadership hierarchies during flock flights, where flock members are ranked according to the average time differences with which they lead or follow others' movement. Here...

Flocking is a paradigmatic example of collective animal behaviour, where global order emerges out of self-organization. Each individual has a tendency to align its flight direction with those of neighbours, and such a simple form of interaction produces a state of collective motion of the group. When compared with other cases of collective ordering, a crucial feature of animal groups is that th...

The Lake Malawi haplochromine cichlid flock is one of the largest vertebrate adaptive radiations. The geographical source of the radiation has been assumed to be rivers to the south and east of Lake Malawi, where extant representatives of the flock are now present. Here, we provide mitochondrial DNA evidence suggesting the sister taxon to the Lake Malawi radiation is within the Great Ruaha rive...