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Record W4416226530 · doi:10.3389/fanim.2025.1694042

Swapping milk for electrolytes: investigating dairy calf activity and hunger after replacing a meal

2025· article· en· W4416226530 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueFrontiers in Animal Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldVeterinary
TopicAnimal health and immunology
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMorningStarterEveningMealCrossover studyMilkingDairy cattle

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Replacing a milk meal with electrolytes is often done to hydrate pre-weaned calves following transport or diarrhea; however, its impact on the hunger and the activity of calves is unknown. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the effect of replacing a milk feeding with electrolytes on the motivation of dairy calves to drink milk at a subsequent meal, the calf starter intake, and their activity. Healthy pre-weaned dairy calves ( n = 100) were enrolled at 23 ± 1 days of age. This crossover study exposed all calves to two treatments over 2 weeks. Each calf received two milk (2.74 L) and two electrolyte (2.74 L of 252 mOSM/L solution) feedings in random order as their morning meal, with a washout period in between. To measure the motivation of calves to drink milk, calves who consumed at least 20% of their morning offered meal, whether milk or electrolytes, received either an unaltered milk replacer or a milk replacer with a bitter additive (0.35 g/L quinine hydrochloride dihydrate) as their evening meal. Over the 2-week study period, the calves were exposed to four daily combinations of treatment (electrolyte vs . milk as the morning meal) and test (bitter vs . regular milk as the evening meal) applications: electrolytes and bitter milk, electrolytes and regular milk, milk and bitter milk, and milk and regular milk. The treatment and test milk order was balanced by calf. The milk replacer, electrolyte, and calf starter quantities were weighed before and after feeding to determine the amount consumed by each calf. A random subset of calves ( n = 69) was outfitted with accelerometers to measure the steps, the activity index, the lying time, and the lying bouts. These activity measures were summarized hourly for the 8 h between feedings on each test day. Regardless of the morning treatment, calves consumed less bitter milk than regular milk in the evening feeding, but an increase in calf willingness to consume bitter milk after replacing a meal with electrolytes was not observed. However, electrolyte-fed calves consumed more grain than milk-fed calves after the morning meal, took fewer steps, had a lower activity index, and spent less time lying at 7 and 8 h following the morning feeding compared with the milk-fed calves. The greater grain intake and less lying time during the hours before the evening feeding of the calves fed electrolytes in the morning compared with those fed milk suggest that substituting a milk meal with an electrolyte meal may increase behaviors indicating hunger in pre-weaned calves.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.736
Threshold uncertainty score0.591

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.030
GPT teacher head0.335
Teacher spread0.305 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it