Horses’ Senses Involvement in Food Location and Selection

Senses are an important part of the interaction with the environment. Previous studies has been established that horses use smell and taste in the selection of their food. The involvement of sight in the selection process has not been clarified up to this study. Here, we investigate the involvement of senses in the selection process of food, also the proportion in which, each senses are involved and we evaluate the horses preferences for different colors. Two experiments have been designed and carried out with two racing horses The results obtained have demonstrated that the sight is the main sense in the location of the food, followed by the sense of olfactory organ involved in selecting plants ingested and the sense of taste which contributes less to the selection. There has also been identified a preference of the envolved horses for the pink color used in this experiment

Clutch size and egg repeatability in three elusive bird species: Little Bittern (Ixobrychus minutus), Little Crake (Zapornia parva) and Water Rail (Rallus aquaticus) from north-west Romanian populations

Data were collected from Little Bittern, Water Rail and Little Crake nests located in North-Western Romania, between April and July of 2002 - 2006 and 2010 - 2012. The repeatability was calculated as intra-class correlation of length, breadth and egg volume coefficients. The total number of active nests considered for the present study was as follows: 43 for Little Bittern, 25 for Water Rail and 9 for Little Crake. The clutch size in Little Bittern ranged from 4 to 7 eggs, in Water Rail from 4 to 10 and in Little Crake from 4 to 8 eggs. The repeatability values of egg parameters varied between 0.844 to 0.860 in Little Bittern, 0.262 - 0.374 in Water Rail and 0.310 - 0.574 in Little Crake. Short-term environmental impact was strong in case of Water Rail and Little Cracke, while the genetic component had little influence. For these two species, the low repeatability could be explained by larger numbers of eggs in a clutch, reflecting in turn a longer laying period. David et al (PDF