Reproductive Performances and Management Effects on Productions of Indigenous Dairy Cows Raised at Char Areas in Northern Bangladesh

The study was conducted to assess the existing reproductive performances and the effect of nutritional supplementation on productions of indigenous cows in Char areas (remote river Jamuna sand islands) in northern part of Bangladesh from October 2009 to March 2010. The study also projected the frequency and determinants of long calving interval (LCI), retention of foetal membrane (RFM), dystocia (D), and abortion (A) in indigenous cattle and explored production trends. Fifty seven dairy households (average breedable cows = 2, range 1 to 3) were visited and data on reproductive, breeding and management histories were collected and statistically analyzed. Overall, 125 breedable indigenous cows were observed to be alive at different stages. The mean (±SE) calving interval were 492 ± 15days and the interval between calving and the initiation of ovarian activity were 143 ± 6.7 days. Birth rate was 53.7 per 100 cows year, with birth been reported to occur in all over of the year. Of the 87 cows that were reported to have calved more than once in their lifetime, 6(6.9%) and 5(5.7%) were associated with abortion and dystocia, respectively. Eight (9.2%) of the animals suffered RFM. All cows were dewormed and supplemented with vitamin-mineral premixes. The body weight of 125 cows and the milk yield of 71 lactating cows were recorded. The mean (± SD) body weight and daily milk yields of the cows during initial and end of veterinary interventions were 121.1 ± 21.0 kg, 1.5 ± 0.1 litres; 165.0 ± 14.0kg and 2.3 ± 0.02 litres, respectively. After productive veterinary interventions, there was an apparent effect of improved health on body weight gain (80g/cow/day) and the average milk yield increased from 1.5 to 2.3 litre/cow. It was concluded that, the present estimate of LCI, birth rate, prevalence of peripartum disorders attributes as the indicators of poor reproductive performances of cows and the productive veterinary health care services improved the general health and production status of the dairy cows in char areas

Effects of Proportion of Egg Yolk and Preservation Time on Chilled Semen from Indigenous Rams

The study was set out to determine the effects of different percentages of egg yolk on quality of chilled semen in Indigenous Rams. Different percentages of egg yolk were used to preserve semen from indigenous rams in Tris based extender at 4°C. Nine 2 to 3 years old rams, weighing 21.5±1.2 kg, body condition score 3.9±0.1 with scrotal circumference of 22.4 ±0.4 cm were selected for collection of semen once a week using artificial vagina. Each ejaculate was divided into four portions, and extended with Tris based diluents containing 5, 10, 15, and 20% egg yolk and kept chilled at 4 to 5°C for up to 48h. Motility, viability, functional integrity and morphology were evaluated before and 24h and 48h of preservation. The results showed significantly (p<0.05) better motility, viability and functional integrity with 10% egg yolk compared to other concentrations of egg yolk during preservation. However, the proportion of egg yolk did not affect spermatozoa quality before preservation and normal morphology in any time during preservation. Time of preservation decreased (p<0.01) the rate of motility, viability, functional integrity, and normal morphology of spermatozoa. Positive correlation coefficient observed between spermatozoa motility, viability, and functional integrity. Functional integrity of spermatozoa positively correlated to morphologically normal spermatozoa. It is concluded that 10% egg yolk in Ttris based diluents may be best for chilled Indigenous ram semen

Baseline Study of Reproductive Performances of Indigenous Rams in Bangladesh

9 , respectively. The rate of motility: 89. 0±0.2, 72.4±0.2, 62.0±0.6, viability: 91.8±0.1, 75.6±0.2, 64.8±0.6, functional integrity: 87.3±0.2, 69.1±0.2, 50.2±0.5 and normal spermatozoa were 94.0±0.1, 77.3±0.1 and 75.0±0.2 in fresh, chilled and frozen semen, respectively

Morphometric traits with reproduction and production performances of indigenous and exotic sheep breeds of Bangladesh

The purpose of this study was to review the existing literature on some important morphological traits associated with reproductive and productive performance in Bangladeshi indigenous and exotic cross sheep. Sheep as small ruminants are essential parts of the crop-livestock of the mixed agricultural farming system playing a crucial role in the livelihood of smallholders in Bangladesh. They are considered risk averters for farmers in a family crisis and seasonal needs through quick sale by direct cash income. Furthermore, their physical products have socio-economic, cultural, and nutritional values: meat, milk, skin, manure, etc. In the past, a number of researchers investigated the relationship between morphometric features and reproductive and productive performance of the referred sheep. Any compilation report is yet not available. Therefore, an update database on Bangladeshi indigenous and exotic cross-breed sheep is required to identify for management and production strategy program. This paper reviewed, discussed, summarized, and compared all articles on morphometric traits and the reproductive and productive performances of sheep in Bangladesh

The use of medicinal plants in health care practices by Rohingya refugees in a degraded forest and conservation area of Bangladesh

People in developing countries traditionally rely on plants for their primary healthcare. This dependence is relatively higher in forests in remote areas due to the lack of access to modern health facilities and easy availability of the plant products.We carried out an ethno-medicinal survey in Teknaf Game Reserve (TGR), a heavily degraded forest and conservation area in southern Bangladesh, to explore the diversity of plants used by Rohingya refugees for treating various ailments. The study also documented the traditional utilization, collection and perceptions of medicinal plants by the Rohingyas residing on the edges of this conservation area. We collected primary information through direct observation and by interviewing older respondents using a semi-structured questionnaire. A total of 34 plant species in 28 families were frequently used by the Rohingyas to treat 45 ailments, ranging from simple headaches to highly complex eye and heart diseases. For medicinal preparations and treating various ailments, aboveground plant parts were used more than belowground parts. The collection of medicinal plants was mostly from the TGR. © 2009 Taylor & Francis

Interactive Fitness Domains in Competitive Coevolutionary Algorithm

Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been successfully applied to a wide range of optimization and search problems where no mathematical model of the quality of a candidate solution is available. Interactive Evolutionary Algorithms (IEA) and Competitive Coevolutionary Algorithms (CCoEA) go one step further by being able to tackle problems where the only means to evaluate the quality of a candidate solution is via interactions. In a typical IEA, interactions take place between the solution being evolved and human evaluators. In a CCoEA, interactions take place between solutions themselves, without need for human interaction. This dissertation identifies computer-aided learning as an application domain that exemplifies the overlap of both fields. In particular, this work first develops a novel interactive and competitive (co)evolutionary approach to evolve candidate solutions. To do so, we identify viable algorithms, analyze them and author new variants of hill climber algorithms. Then, we design and implement a competitive coevolutionary interaction-based algorithm. The performance of the resulting heuristic is evaluated with respect to its ability to approximate a full Coevolutionary Dimension Extraction (CDE) process. This allows us to ensure that the proposed approach evolves candidate solutions that have pedagogically relevant in an educational application. However, the underlying hill climber algorithm produces some candidate solutions that exhibit the same interaction outcomes against opponent solutions. So, we also propose different approaches to improve the diversity of the solutions being evolved. To this end, we relax the strict acceptance condition in existing hill climbing algorithms relying on Pareto dominance. The proposed variant draw its inspiration from the Non-dominated Sorted Genetic Algorithm (NSGA), commonly used in evolutionary multixobjectives optimization. We also introduce selection methods based on competitive shared fitness, and the analysis of the interaction space among solutions. Finally, we study Pareto dominance relations of coevolutionary interactions by looking at the interaction matrix of both coevolutionary benchmarks and our educational application. This results in a unique perspective to understanding both structural and relational dominance in coevolutionary interactions. This method can be applied in any open-ended problems where the quality of solutions can not be defined mathematically. It reveals the applicability of CDE, its sensitivity to dominance relations, and its robustness to noisy outcomes

Wink based facial expression classification using machine learning approach

Facial expression may establish communication between physically disabled people and assistive devices. Different types of facial expression including eye wink, smile, eye blink, looking up and looking down can be extracted from the brain signal. In this study, the possibility of controlling assistive devices using the individual’s wink has been investigated. Brain signals from the five subjects have been captured to recognize the left wink, right wink, and no wink. The brain signals have been captured using Emotiv Insight which consists of five channels. Fast Fourier transform and the sample range have been computed to extract the features. The extracted features have been classified with the help of different machine learning algorithms. Here, support vector machine (SVM), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) have been employed to classify the features sets. The performance of the classifier in terms of accuracy, confusion matrix, true positive and false positive rate and the area under curve (AUC)—receiver operating characteristics (ROC) have been evaluated. In the case of sample range, the highest training and testing accuracies are 98.9% and 96.7% respectively which have been achieved by two classifiers namely, SVM and K-NN. The achieved results indicate that the person’s wink can be utilized in controlling assistive devices

Does Relaxing Strict Acceptance Condition Improve Test Based Pareto Coevolution?

The strict acceptance condition between parent and child is one of the guarantees of monotonic progress in Pareto co-evolution. However, this condition results in stalling in progress especially when the cardinality of test set is as large as in the scale of population size in a test based coevolutionary algorithm. We presented two variants of Pareto based Coevolutionary Hill Climber algorithms - rP-PHC-P that relax the strict condition based on competitive shared fitness of non-comparable (parent, child) pairs and fP-PHC-P which relaxes the condition in the form of discarding Pareto dominated candidate solutions regardless of being parent or child as soon as the Pareto front is created. Both of the algorithms improve the progress, are successfully tested for avoiding overspecialization and keep less non-unique candidate solutions in the population slot compare to P-PHC-P

Effects of duration of preservation and glycerol percentages on quality of frozen ram semen

ABSTRACT The aims of the present study were to determine the effectiveness of the undertaken freezing technique of indigenous ram semen (with different percentages of glycerol and different thawing times) by observing the post thaw motility at 24, 48 and 72 hours of preservation. Nine ejaculates were collected from each 6 mature rams using artificial vagina method. The ejaculates were frozen using Tris-citric acid egg yolk media having different percentages of glycerol (3, 5, and 7) in two step dilution method. The post thaw motility was observed in different temperature (37 0 , 40 0 and 45 0 C) and time (12, 12 and 10 seconds). The motility percentages after freezing for 24, 48 and 72 hours of duration varied from 8-50%, 8-50% and 4-45%. The significantly highest (P&lt;0.01) motility (35.3 ± 7.8%) was observed after 24 hours of preservation compared with 48 and 72 hours (30.6 ± 8.0%, 28.8 ± 7.9%). The normal morphology percentages after freezing of ram semen for 24, 48 and 72 hours of duration varied from 63-89%, 60-85%, and 58-80%. The significantly highest (P&lt;0.05) normal morphology (79.9 ± 4.0%) was observed after 24 hours of preservation compared with 48 and 72 hours (75.8 ± 4.4%, 73.3 ± 4.6%). The significantly highest (P&lt;0.01) sperm motility (39.1 ± 5.8%) was observed with 5% glycerol, at 40 0 C for 12 seconds thawing temperature and time compared with 37 0 C for 12 seconds and 45 0 C for 10 seconds, respectively. The study revealed a preliminary data which deserve further study to optimize the measures for sustainable freezing of indigenous ram semen