Why did the poulet cross the penitentiary ? No , seriously . That ’s a legitimate scientific question . The agency chickens move through a penitentiary may separate us a stack about whether or not they ’re finger well and how many chance they have to spread unwellness . Now scientist are studying how poulet locomotion can reveal disease — knowledge that could help farmers do a good caper of head off sure kinds of outbreaks .
As he and his colleague recently recounted in the journalMathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences , Arni S.R. Srinivasa Rao , a numerical modeler and associate prof at Georgia ’s Augusta University , has spent years developing numerical manikin that could aid in the understanding of how Avian flu spreads .
of late , he team up up with collaborators Fiona Tomley and Damer Blake , from the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London , to get a line about outbreaks ofEimeria , a sponge that spreads easily among chickens and other farm animal , have diarrhea , weakness , and weight loss . The pathogen cost the poultry industry gazillion of one dollar bill each year .
“ The living of farmers depends on their poultry , so it ’s a big loss if we ’re not using technology to support them , ” pronounce Rao .
One Clarence Shepard Day Jr. while observing a group of chickens in their pen , Rao had an mind : What might be learned about the spread ofEimeriaby documenting the routes crybaby take as they go about their daily business — chiefly eat , drink , fray , pecking , and make — and plugging that data into numerical poser ?
Rao and his collaborators keep chicken pen in India and in England . He commemorate the chickens ’ road and the amount of meter they spent wipe out and drinking , walk and standing around , and where they pooped and pecked .
The next footmark involved plotting on a grid each chicken ’s movements , and multiply that by the total number of chickens to find out how often they track each other ’s paths , and hence had opportunity to spread disease .
He also study item-by-item chickens ’ movements to look for deviations in their idiosyncratic patterns , which might indicate unwellness .
“ What we see is that the space cover by a sick wimp is substantially less than for a sizeable chicken , ” say Rao . “ septic chickens become so pale that it ’s hard for them to move , while healthy chickens frequently skip around and move to different persona of the pen . ”
Plotted on the grid , the sick chickens ’ paths seem as a single line between , say , the urine and the roost , while tidy chickens bring out multiple lines that pass over the entire space of the grid .
The next footfall for the team is to use brio software and engender models that can help predict the motion of sick and respectable chicken within a particular mathematical group .
Rao would finally like to see farmers themselves use life software system to translate TV of their flocks into visual patterns and models that can serve identify sick wench in as little as a day — something that is n’t so easy on large poultry farm .
These models would allow farmers to more apace isolate a sick chicken , reducing handling cost and slowing the scatter of disease . Rao believes similar models could also be adapted for other farm animals .
