Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Animal Sciences
The Effect Of Breeding Herd Parity Structure On Genetic Improvement Of The Sow Herd, Caitlyn E. Abell
The Effect Of Breeding Herd Parity Structure On Genetic Improvement Of The Sow Herd, Caitlyn E. Abell
Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
This study focuses on the value of the genetic lag associated with maintaining sows for additional parities in a commercial swine herd. Three traits were included in this study: number born alive (NBA), 21 day litter weight (W21), and days to market (D250). The economic values assigned to these traits were $22.00/pig, $0.70/lb., and $0.17/day, respectively. The genetic improvement per generation made for each trait was assumed to be 0.3 pigs, 3.0 lbs., and 3.0 days, respectively. It was estimated that the value of the genetic lag associated with retaining a sow to P3, P5, and P7 was $24.80, $46.89, …
Isolation Of A 3-Methylindole-Producing Bacterium From A Swine Waste Lagoon, Michelle L. Fusting
Isolation Of A 3-Methylindole-Producing Bacterium From A Swine Waste Lagoon, Michelle L. Fusting
Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
With an increase in animal production closer to populated areas, odorants from animal waste are a rapidly rising concern. 3-Methylindole (3-MI) is an odorant produced from the biodegradation of L-tryptophan by bacteria in animal waste. Currently, no 3-MI producing bacterium has been isolated from swine waste, and isolation of such an organism would provide insight into production and regulation of 3-MI. Therefore, an experiment was designed to isolate a 3-MI producer based on previous work which indicates the presence of Fe(III) increases 3-MI levels. An Enterococcus sp. was isolated from WKU's primary swine waste lagoon in rich, anaerobic medium plus …
Curing Nature-Deficit Disorder: How Environmental Education Helps Kids Learn, Jamie Leigh Langley
Curing Nature-Deficit Disorder: How Environmental Education Helps Kids Learn, Jamie Leigh Langley
Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
Walk into any public school and talk with the children about their experiences in nature and you will begin to see a pattern. Children have made few connections with the world around them. They do not spend much time outdoors and the time they do spend outdoors is not spent interacting directly with nature. Why does this matter? Look at these same kids and you will see another pattern emerging: Attention-Deficit Disorder, depression, obesity, emotional problems, etc. While not all of these problems are directly caused by a lack of interaction with the natural world, current research shows that there …
Where Do They Go When They Die?, Meridith L. Bartley
Where Do They Go When They Die?, Meridith L. Bartley
Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects
Food webs and matrices are vital to understanding feeding relationships and ecology. Adjacency matrices can be employed to present the direct relationships between predators and prey; these binary matrices utilize 0’s to denote no direct link and 1’s to denote a direct link. We analyzed a variety of published food webs ranging from pine forests in the United States to tussock grasslands in New Zealand. The food webs varied in number of distinguishable taxa present, functional diversity, climates and habitats. Consequently, we expect that our results are not specific to a given system. The published food webs lack flows from …