2009-09-22

Sustainable selection on body weight in minks

In several species breeders want to increase the body weight to obtain more efficient animals. Often animals are fed ad libitum to give the opportunity to animals to show their growth (as well as obesity) to a maximal extent. However, Danish scientist reported that this might not be sustainable - at least for minks. They conducted the experiment with restricted and ad libitum feeding regime and found out that minks from the restricted group were more fertile and had better utilization of feed. I wonder how does this relate to pigs, rabbits, etc.

2 comments:

romunov said...

This reminds me of a paper that talks about small aquarium fishes, perhaps guppies and their fertility and life span. Unfortunately I don't have the paper handy but if I understand correctly, they exposed a group of fishes to a predator (a bass I think) but with enough hiding places. They found out that fishes without the predator had shorter life spans and produced less offspring compared to the group where predator was lurking "behind every stone".

Gorjanc Gregor said...

Nice addition. Thanks!