Behavioral Differentiation between Anas poecilorhyncha and Domestic Duck

Anas poecilorhyncha is one of improved variety of mallards, which was the protected bird species listed by International Union for Conservation of Nature （1UCN）. Little is known until now about behavioral characteristics of the mallard. The objective of this study was to compare the behavioral differentials between A. poecilorhyncha and domestic duck in order to make a strategy to manage A. poecilorhyncha under the condition of animal welfare. A total of 180 birds were distributed into six groups with 30 birds for each group. They were placed in a room of 3 m ~ 4 m and fed for one year old. Sansui ducks, a kind of native domestic duck （Sansui laying duck） were used for behavioral comparison. Two different rooms in the same building were applied, one room for A. poecilorhyncha and another one for Sansui ducks. All behaviors for A. poecilorhyncha and Sansui ducks were coded using the program The Observer XT 11.5 （Noldus Information Technology, Beijing）. The duration of observation was from 8：00 am to 18：00 pm daily and lasted 5 d. The results showed that there were similar behavioral percentages between A. poecilorhyncha and domestic duck. Percentages of standing activity spent for A. poecilorhyncha and Sansui duck were 34.59% and 30.25%, respectively. Accordingly, the activities, such as wing plugging, preening and head stretching, were more than 5.51%. The other activities, including walking, drinking and tail wagging, occupied less proportions （〈 3%）. While the specific behaviors, like aggression, alerting, wing dithering, clawing, nodding, pendulum clawing and crawling, took less than 1% of percentage. There were large differences between A. poecilorhyncha and domestic duck when comparing eight behavioral peaks. Lag sequential analysis was used to calculate frequency of transition between a pair of activities. Some parameters were very significant, like the frequency value from foraging converted to drinking in Sansui duck was 369-515, but 37-65 in A. poecilorhyncha. The best explaining could be given that Sansui duck was better domesticated than spot-billed duck. This study provides the basic data to study and develop spot-billed duck.

Establishment of a standardized daily behavior collection and analysis system for brain disease models of rhesus and cynomolgus monkeys and its application in autism spectrum disorder

Complex brain diseases seriously endanger human health,and early diagnostic biomarkers and effective treatments are currently lacking.Due to ethical constraints on human research,establishing monkey models is crucial to address these issues.With the rapid development of technology,transgenic monkey models of a range of brain diseases,especially autism spectrum disorder(ASD),have been successfully established.However,to establish practical and effective brain disease models and subsequently apply them to disease mechanism and treatment studies,there is still a lack of a standard tool,i.e.,a system for collecting and analyzing the daily behaviors of brain disease model monkeys.Therefore,with the goal of undertaking a comprehensive and quantitative study of behavioral phenotypes,we established a standard daily behavior collection and analysis system,including behavioral data collection protocols and a monkey daily behavior ethogram(MDBE)for rhesus and cynomolgus monkeys,which are the most commonly used non-human primates in model construction.Then,we used ASD as an application example after referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,Fifth Edition,Text Revision(DSM-5-TR),which is widely used in clinical disease diagnosis to obtain ASD core clinical symptoms.We then established a sub-ethogram(ASD monkey core behavior ethogram(MCBE-ASD))specifically for quantitative assessment of the core clinical symptoms of an ASD monkey model based on MDBE.Subsequently,we demonstrated the high reproducibility of the system.