Lecture 19 Flashcards
Feeding behaviour
What is feeding behaviour?
2pt
- Feeding behaviour: Any action of an animal that is directed toward the procurement of nutrients.
- Goal directed behaviour: Distinct appetitive and consummatory phase.
Low blood glucose - increase motivation - appetitive behaviour - consummatory behaviour (negative feedback on motivation and low blood glucose)
What is optimality?
4pt
- Optimize the animals growth and utilize energy
- Based on energy - Mechanisms for the optimal allocation of time and energy expenditures
- Multifactorial control - Minimise the total discomfort generated by the several signals from various body systems
- Overall fitness - A function of its contribution to survival, growth and reproduction over the organism’s lifetime
What is ontogeny?
3pt
Ontogeny: Adaptive behaviour that determines the nutrients that an animal includes in its diet in order to maximize its fitness.
* Dietary preference based on associations made between food type and post-ingestive consequences.
* Remarkable because feeding behaviour and digestive consequences can be separated by many minutes or hours
Feeding behaviour
How does sickness impact feeding behaviour?
2pt
- Many diseases or painful procedures result in alterations of feeding and/or ruminating patterns.
- Various health issues (e.g. obesity, rumen acidosis) caused by the animal’s inability to develop accurate associations between the diet and its post-ingestive consequences.
Highly palatable food as psychostimulants?
2pt
- Hyper-palatable foods combine high levels of fat, sugar, sodium, and/or carbohydrates to trigger the brain’s reward system.
- Dopamine acts on areas of the brain to give you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation.
How does previous experiences impact feeding behaviour?
3pt
- Initiate feeding
- Efficiency of finding food
- Rate of ingestion
what is conditioned taste aversion?
3pt
- Using ruminants for weed control in agroforestry is more sustainable than using herbicides
- Lithium Chloride is considered a useful tool for training livestock to avoid specific foods or plants
- The efficiency of CTA depends on food novelty, product and dose used to create the aversion, availability of alternative feeds, animal species, breed and age
What are body signals that trigger feeding behaviour?
7pt
- Visual, taste and olfactory input
- Hormones - Leptin, Ghrelin, Amylin
- Gastrointestinal receptors - Mechanosensitivity: Tension & motility, Chemosensitivity: Osmolality & acidity
- Liver receptors - Glucose, Nitrogenous compounds, Osmolality
- Age - More efficient as they get older
- Breed - Genetic component and selection
- Sex - Social and hormonal differences
What are food characteristics that impact feeding behaviour?
3pt
- Amount and type of grain and forage: particle size/effective fiber, degradability/digestibility
- Feed additives: flavours, monensin, sodium bicarbonate
- While foraging: Spatial distribution, abundance, ease of prehension, palatability, filling effect
What are feeding managements that impact feeding behaviour?
3pt
- Feeding frequency: More deliveries, more stable consumption.
- Feed bunk management: ad libitum, clean bunk, restricted
- Consistency of feeding: Irregular schedules (delays, health issues) may cause animals to ingest larger quantities of feed during a short time
How does surroundings impact feeding behaviours?
1pt
Animals graze at faster rates when they know that the herbage available is limited
Even when food is continually available, social animals usually synchronize their feeding
What are other factors impacting feeding behaviour?
4pt
- Temperature
- Shearing
- Disease
- Photoperiod
