the base of this review is to consider the relevant role that animal factors (potential milk yield, body weight, body condition score, state of lactation, parity and fertility) play on milk performance (considering the energy balance and the rumen function across the full lactation curve of animals) and milk quality (milk protein content, milk fat content, milk lactose content, vitamins, minera...

A grazing trial compared the effect of stocking rate on corn residue removal and nutrient quality over a 55 d period. Treatments included no removal (control), light grazing (2.5 animal unit months/ha), heavy grazing (4.9 animal unit months/ha), and baling (bale), that were applied to eight 6.6 ha paddocks (2 replications) on a 53 ha center pivot irrigated field of corn residue from mid-Decembe...

Mass-specific rates of aerobic metabolism VO2/Mb) scale in inverse proportion to body mass (Mb). Thus, small hummingbirds display the highest VO2/Mb known among vertebrates. Among all animals, higher VO2/Mb values are known only in flying insects. The high body-mass-specific rates of metabolism seen in hummingbirds are made possible by high lung O2 diffusing capacities, cardiac outputs, ratios ...

Molds and mycotoxins are contaminants of animal feed causing spoilage and clinical intoxication. Animal exposure to mycotoxins reflects diet composition with major differences occurring between animals kept predominantly of pastures, i.e. ruminants and horses, and those consuming formulated feed like pigs and poultry. Mixed feeds are composed of several ingredients, often sourced from different...

To understand how organisms adapt, researchers must link performance and microhabitat. However, measuring performance, especially maximum performance, can sometimes be difficult. Here, we describe an improvement over previous techniques that only consider the largest observed values as maxima. Instead, we model expected performance observations via the Weibull distribution, a statistical approa...

The apparent digestibility coefficients (ADC) of unprocessed and processed pea, canola and flax products were determined on diets, in which 30% of a reference diet was replaced by each test ingredient. Celite was used as an indigestible marker for measuring apparent digestibility coefficients indirectly. The trial was conducted in a semi-closed recirculating system using 5 tanks per diet with 4...

During the last decade increasingly sophisticated positron emission tomography (PET) scanners have been developed for imaging small laboratory animals. These systems often exhibit performance characteristics, e.g. spatial resolution, substantially better than contemporary human PET scanners and are often the first systems to demonstrate new technologies, e.g. avalanche photodiodebased detector ...