Litter size affects nest-building behavior in group-housed sows
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sows have an innate need for nest-building (NB) before farrowing and a lack of NB can impair parturition. Moreover, in the modern hyperprolific sows, parturitions are challenged by large litters. However, the interpretation of NB behavior in relation to different environments or sow physiology is unclear. Our objective was to observe NB behavior in group farrowing sows that were housed in individual unconfined farrowing pens and abundant straw in a group farrowing unit. The aim was to provide the best indoor substitute for natural farrowing environment, with a total space per sow of 9.6–11.9 m2. We monitored 33 parturitions from five farrowing groups of 7–10 sows on a farm located in western Finland. Sows represented different breeds (Norwegian Landrace and Finnish Landrace × Yorkshire) and parities (parities 1–7, mean parity 3.6 ± 1.8), and with multiparous sows having all farrowed previously in the same environment. Sow behavior was recorded with internet protocol cameras (Niceview NICECAN420WL, Niceview Corp.) for 24 h before birth of the first piglet (BFP) to observe NB (defined as pawing, rooting, arranging, or collecting NB material lasting for at least 5 s). The NB data over the 24 h were analyzed in relation to productivity data (sow parity, litter size, live and stillborn piglets, farrowing duration, and piglet birth weight) using the general linear mixed model (SPSS® program, version 25.0, SPSS® Inc.). Further, NB data was divided in twelve 2 h periods and analyzed with repeated measures ANOVA, including litter size as binomial variable (≤16 piglets vs. >16 piglets) in the model. The NB behavior over 24 h showed a temporal pattern, where average NB 12–0 h before BFP was greater than 24–12 h before BFP (213 ± 95 vs. 52 ± 39 min, p < 0.001). Most activity occurred 8–4 h before BFP, followed by a decrease in activity 4–0 h before BFP. While total NB during 24 h (267 ± 110 min) was unaffected by productivity variables, sows with 17 piglets or more showed increased NB 4–2 h and 2–0 h before farrowing compared to sows with less than 17 piglets (26 ± 7 vs. 50 ± 7 min, p = 0.02, and 11 ± 5 vs. 29 ± 5 min, p = 0.022, respectively). This led a to delayed prepartal decrease in NB activity in sows with large litters. Results support previous findings on the effect of large litters on sow physiology, but it remains unclear whether the increased NB in large litters reflects a negative physiological response or a beneficial effect to compensate for the challenge of this great litter size. Further research should aim at defining different elements of NB in different environments and productivity outcomes. Current results from the novel group farrowing environment highlight the importance of NB in the parturition process, as well as the requirement to follow the consequences of increased litter sizes, while suggesting that a sufficient decrease in NB activity before BFP is a vital element of adequate NB.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it