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Precision Livestock Farming And Personality As Tools To Understand Dairy Calf Individual Variation In Performance, Behavior, And Response To Stress, Megan Marie Woodrum Setser

Theses and Dissertations--Animal and Food Sciences

Individual differences impact animal responses to their environments and can be observed with animal personality (stable behavioral differences with populations) and food neophobia (avoidance of unfamiliar feeds). These individual differences can influence cattle performance and welfare. Precision technologies, such as automatic feeding systems (AFS) and accelerometers continuously measure feeding behaviors and activity and may allow us to relate individual differences to behaviors in the home environment. Therefore, the first objective was to determine if food neophobia was associated with feeding behaviors measured by AFS. Food neophobia was associated with rewarded visits to the AFS, but to no other feeding behaviors. …

Multilevel Phenotypic Integration Of Metabolism And Behavior In House Sparrows And Mice, Tim Salzman

Theses and Dissertations--Biology

Patterns of multilevel variation in behavior, both within and among individuals, raise challenging questions about underlying mechanisms and the selective pressures acting on them. One intriguing hypothesis is that physiology shows parallel multilevel variation, and so might represent a latent trait that integrates multilevel behavioral responses. For example, foraging acquires the fuel needed to maintain metabolism, and in turn, an individual’s metabolism affects expression of foraging, and other, behaviors. Metabolism and behavior thus might coevolve to become integrated traits. Despite the appeal of this hypothesis, numerous investigations into the link between metabolism and behavior have yielded largely equivocal results.

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