chicken behavior

Today I would like to share about chicken behavioral patterns. I am just interested to talk about it. Sometimes I am curious and ask to myself about what chicken is doing, does it have a meaning or no? So I browsed the net and yes, I found some information of it. And here it is.

Ethology is study of animal behavioral patterns or the study of the behavior of animal in their natural habit, usually proposing evolutionary explanations. That behavior means the expression of animal that poured into moves on consequence of stimulation (Prijono and Handini, 1998). The stimulation is coming from the body inside and outside of animal (Scott, 1969). The outside stimulation could be sound, view, mechanical energy, and chemical stimulus, whereas inside stimulation could be factors of hormone secretion, and motivation (Mukhtar, 1986). Hailman (1985) revealed that animal behavioral patterns have divided into eight categories. Those are acted of moving (fly, jump, walk), kept the body, ate, resisted, sexualized, nested, mothered, and interspecific behavior. And here I just get down about eating, drinking, sleeping, and pecking behavior of chicken.

The first is about eating behavior in chicken. Eating behavior of fowls is influenced by the length of daylight, and the social environment around. Chickens cannot eat within dark situation or if the length daylight is short (Morris, 1967). Metabolic rate of fowls is faster than others animals, therefore the lack nutrition in their food will stand out (Welty, 1979). Eating behavior is also influenced by temperature, and other activities of chickens. When the temperature increases, the fowls will retard the speed of metabolism by decreasing appetite in order to establish a normal temperature in their body (Priyanto, 2002).

Secondly, drinking behavior has close related to eating behavior. There are many factors that influence fowls to consume water; those are temperature, water temperature, the level of consumptive food, and body size (Bailey, 1990; Wandoyo, 1997). In the tropic, chicken can consume 500 ml/day (Williamson and Payne, 2003). When chicken drinks water, chicken let its beak down, and then its maw slopes as well as raises its head on the back (Sparks and Andrew, 1982).

Thirdly is sleeping behavior of fowls. Sleeping activity is necessary for chicken to keep and cool down the body from exhaustion. Chicken usually sleeps in position the body falls down along with chest adheres and the eyes closed during 30 seconds on minimum (Mayes, 1983).

Pecking behavior is term on a day to day basis for social organization hierarchy system of chicken. This behavior revealed for the first time by Thorlief Schjelderup-Ebbe in 1921 (Wikipedia, 2012). Pecking behavior has classification as cannibalism (Savory, 1995). Pecking activity with higher frequency can be happened because the stall density is near with its food. Pecking activity of hen is visible often on battery-stall, because it is easy to keep its body cleaned by sweeping with its beak. (Appleby at al, 1992). The fowls do an activity such as threaten, fight, and flee by pecking (Hailman, 1985). Pecking activity shows also dominance and attacker characteristics (Appleby at al., 1992).

forensic

A few months ago, my friends had a presentation about forensic.  And now I’m interested to share about it in my blog. First of all I want to thank to friends of mine who gave me the article about forensic. Actually, it’s their assignment, LOL. And here my review is.

Forensic is the study of crime scene investigation, generally connected to the justice to gather the right indication to resolve the crime. And as we know that CSI or crime science investigation is the methods by using all science disciplines to reveal the cases by reconstructing and collecting the evidence.

The branches of forensic have divided into several branches which are distinguished by the view.  The several branches of forensic are medical forensic, physical forensic, chemical forensic, photography forensic, biological forensic, and many more. Biology is always fascinating to me, so I take biological forensic to be explained. And you know that biological forensic has divided into several branches, those are entomology forensic, toxicology forensic, botanical forensic, microbiological forensic, molecular forensic, and many more.

When we need to identify of illegal logging, foods quality and legality, sexual assaults and paternity tests, we take molecular biology method to know the answers. How does it work? It is exactly by identifying of DNA in the crime scene. DNA is full form Deoxyribonucleic Acid, is a substance carrying organism’s genetic information, a nucleic acid molecule in the form of twisted double strand double helix, DNA that is found in all living organisms except some viruses, reproduces itself and is the means by which hereditary characteristics pass from one generation to the next.

You know that the most of three billion bases in human DNA are precisely the same. DNA has 99.8% of the similarities and only 0.2% of the difference. And it’s more enough to distinguish one to another. So, that is way we can analyze the DNA.  The bases or letters in human DNA can be removed and added, and the region of the DNA can be repeated to be different kind of times. There are two types of analyzing the DNA in the main; those are Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) and Mitochondrial DNA.

Firstly, Short Tandem Repeats has divided into two types of identification. The first is Locus or Loci, relates to the location of chromosome and allele. The second is type of DNA, the allele will become the number of how many DNA have been repeated.  There are some of the basic steps of the analysis. Those are extraction and amplification and separation. Extraction is the step of separating DNA from the sample, and amplification came to be called PCR is the step to amplify small portion of DNA, then separation is to separate the amplified fragment length polymorphism (method for detecting DNA variations) accords to size by using ABI 310 Genetic Analyzer.

Secondly is Mitochondrial DNA, we can use mitochondria because the mitochondria each have multiple copies in every single cell. MtDNA is usually used for old and degraded samples. In MtDNA the sequences are examined. There are the basic steps to analyze DNA, first is extraction is used to separate DNA from the samples, second is amplification of PCR is used to amplify small portion of mtDNA (D loop). And thirdly, sequencing is used by another reaction and separation of sequenced fragment.

That is all I want to share here, though I know my review is still coming up short information so much about forensic, because I get slothfulness latterly. But I will do my best for the next chapter. I accept every comments and thanks for your visit.