Rabbit Intensification Systems in Rwanda: Feeding Influence and Growth

A study was conducted in Northern Province of Rwanda, from the College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Busogo Campus located in Musanze district to evaluate the effect of feed type on rabbit growth in rabbit intensification systems in Rwanda. The Complete Randomized Design (CRD) was used and data were collected on rabbit growth weekly for a period of 12 weeks. The experiment was composed of three treatments replicated ten times. The treatments included three types of feeds namely;cabbage combined with Mucuna pruriens added to local forage (I), cabbages combined with Leucaena leucocephala added to local forage (II) and a control composed of other varieties of locally available forage, such as Bidens pilosa, Crassocephalum vitellium and Galinsoga parviflora (III) which was considered as the control (Farmers practice). The feeds were given to ten rabbits separated in individual cages, and each rabbit was considered a replicate. Water was given ad libitum. One month old rabbits (weaners) were used and data were collected after one week of adaptation for 12 weeks. The results showed that the mean of weight gain after 12 weeks was 783.3 g, 760.7 g and 705.7 g for feed type I, II and III respectively. The difference between means of feed types after 12 weeks was not significant (p > 0.5), which implied that rabbit growth did not depend on the feed type. The mean weight gain after 8 weeks was 707.5 g, 661.4 g and 577.1 g for feed type I, II and III respectively. At 8 weeks, the difference between means of feed types was significant (p Mucuna pruriens combined with cabbage and local forage were growing faster than rabbits from other treatments at 8 weeks. The researchers recommended that farmers should be facilitated with feeding materials by the concerned institutions. Training of rabbit farmers and further researches on locally available feeding materials were also given as recommendations at the end of this study.

Spatiotemporal variation in community structure of marine benthic ciliates in the Yellow Sea during and after macroalgal and giant jellyfish blooms

The annual bloom of the green macroalgal Ulva prolifera from May through July since 2008 and another of giant jellyfi sh Nemopilema nomurai from June through September have been frequent events in the Yellow Sea. However, the patterns of benthic ciliate communities during and after the blooms are still not known. In combination with analyses of benthic environmental factors, we investigated the distribution and community composition of benthic ciliates in the Yellow Sea in July and November 2011. In July, ciliates had high standing crops and diversity in the northern Yellow Sea, and in the inshore area off the southern Shandong Peninsula, where large numbers of green macroalgae accumulated. In November, the abundance, biomass and diversity of ciliates were high in the sea areas off the Shandong Peninsula and Changjiang estuary, where a large quantity of jellyfi sh occurred in August. Neither the abundance nor the biomass had signifi cant diff erence between seasons, or between diff erent compartments of the Yellow Sea. The species number, and both Margalef and Shannon-Wiener indices of ciliates were all signifi cantly higher in November than in July. In both seasons, prostomateans and karyorelicteans consistently constituted the fi rst and second most important ciliate groups in biomass; and carnivorous ciliates constituted the primary feeding type in terms of biomass as well as species richness, followed by bacterivores, algivores and omnivores. Compared with that in June 2007 when no macroalgae occurred, the percentage of small-sized bacterivores(e.g. Metacystis spp., Euplotes spp. and scuticociliates) increased in July 2011. The proportion of carnivorous ciliates increased in November, and this increased dominance of carnivorous ciliates may be a response to the increase in predominance of heterotrophic nanofl agellates, which might in turn be ascribed to an eff ect of green macroalgal and giant jellyfi sh blooms in the Yellow Sea.