Intake and Diet Selection by Sheep Grazing Grass/Clover Patches

The effects of the spatial dispersion of ryegrass (Lolium perenne L) and clover (Trifolium repens L), at the feeding station scale, on diet composition and feeding behaviour were studied for sheep. There were no significant changes in diet composition with changes in the spatial dispersion of sward components. Bite size, bite rate and intake rate did increase as the species became more aggregated

Woodland Recovery after Suppression of Deer: Cascade effects for Small Mammals, Wood Mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) and Bank Voles (Myodes glareolus)

Over the past century, increases in both density and distribution of deer species in the Northern Hemisphere have resulted in major changes in ground flora and undergrowth vegetation of woodland habitats, and consequentially the animal communities that inhabit them. In this study, we tested whether recovery in the vegetative habitat of a woodland due to effective deer management (from a peak of 0.4–1.5 to <0.17 deer per ha) had translated to the small mammal community as an example of a higher order cascade effect. We compared deer-free exclosures with neighboring open woodland using capture-mark-recapture (CMR) methods to see if the significant difference in bank vole (Myodes glareolus) and wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) numbers between these environments from 2001–2003 persisted in 2010. Using the multi-state Robust Design method in program MARK we found survival and abundance of both voles and mice to be equivalent between the open woodland and the experimental exclosures with no differences in various metrics of population structure (age structure, sex composition, reproductive activity) and individual fitness (weight), although the vole population showed variation both locally and temporally. This suggests that the vegetative habitat - having passed some threshold of complexity due to lowered deer density - has allowed recovery of the small mammal community, although patch dynamics associated with vegetation complexity still remain. We conclude that the response of small mammal communities to environmental disturbance such as intense browsing pressure can be rapidly reversed once the disturbing agent has been removed and the vegetative habitat is allowed to increase in density and complexity, although we encourage caution, as a source/sink dynamic may emerge between old growth patches and the recently disturbed habitat under harsh conditions

Snout Shape in Extant Ruminants

Copyright: © 2014 Tennant, MacLeod. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. [4.0 license]. The attached file is the published version of the article

A note on the growth of early-weaned Hampshire piglets

SUMMARYThe appetite and growth of individually-fed, weaned Hampshire and Saddleback piglets and of Hampshire and Large White × Landrace piglets were compared in three experiments from 14 to 49, 28 to 55 and 21 to 45 days of age. There was a reduced rate of growth in the Hampshire piglets, which was not found to be related to any need of Hampshire piglets for a higher quality diet. Neither was there any reduction in the efficiency with which Hampshire piglets used ingested nutrients, nor a differential rate of deposition of any body component. Hampshire piglets ate less food than Saddleback or Large White × Landrace piglets and this reduced appetite was largely accounted for by the lower body size.</jats:p