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      Spectral entropy of early-life distress calls as an iceberg indicator of chicken welfare

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          Abstract

          Chicks ( Gallus gallus domesticus) make a repetitive, high energy ‘distress’ call when stressed. Distress calls are a catch-all response to a range of environmental stressors, and elicit food calling and brooding from hens. Pharmacological and behavioural laboratory studies link expression of this call with negative affective state. As such, there is an a priori expectation that distress calls on farms indicate not only physical, but emotional welfare. Using whole-house recordings on 12 commercial broiler flocks ( n = 25 090–26 510/flock), we show that early life (day 1–4 of placement) distress call rate can be simply and linearly estimated using a single acoustic parameter: spectral entropy. After filtering to remove low-frequency machinery noise, spectral entropy per minute of recording had a correlation of −0.88 with a manual distress call count. In videos collected on days 1–3, age-specific behavioural correlates of distress calling were identified: calling was prevalent (spectral entropy low) when foraging/drinking were high on day 1, but when chicks exhibited thermoregulatory behaviours or were behaviourally asynchronous thereafter. Crucially, spectral entropy was predictive of important commercial and welfare-relevant measures: low median daily spectral entropy predicted low weight gain and high mortality, not only into the next day, but towards the end of production. Further research is required to identify what triggers, and thus could alleviate, distress calling in broiler chicks. However, within the field of precision livestock farming, this work shows the potential for simple descriptors of the overall acoustic environment to be a novel, tractable and real-time ‘iceberg indicator’ of current and future welfare.

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          Most cited references44

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          Early growth conditions, phenotypic development and environmental change.

          Phenotypic development is the result of a complex interplay involving the organism's own genetic make-up and the environment it experiences during development. The latter encompasses not just the current environment, but also indirect, and sometimes lagged, components that result from environmental effects on its parents that are transmitted to their developing offspring in various ways and at various stages. These environmental effects can simply constrain development, for example, where poor maternal condition gives rise to poorly provisioned, low-quality offspring. However, it is also possible that environmental circumstances during development shape the offspring phenotype in such a way as to better prepare it for the environmental conditions it is most likely to encounter during its life. Studying the extent to which direct and indirect developmental responses to environmental effects are adaptive requires clear elucidation of hypotheses and careful experimental manipulations. In this paper, I outline how the different paradigms applied in this field relate to each other, the main predictions that they produce and the kinds of experimental data needed to distinguish among competing hypotheses. I focus on birds in particular, but the theories discussed are not taxon specific. Environmental influences on phenotypic development are likely to be mediated, in part at least, by endocrine systems. I examine evidence from mechanistic and functional avian studies and highlight the general areas where we lack key information.
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            On the meaning of alarm calls: functional reference in an avian vocal system

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              Classification and regression by randomforest

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                J R Soc Interface
                J R Soc Interface
                RSIF
                royinterface
                Journal of the Royal Society Interface
                The Royal Society
                1742-5689
                1742-5662
                June 2020
                10 June 2020
                10 June 2020
                : 17
                : 167
                : 20200086
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Biological and Marine Sciences, University of Plymouth , Plymouth, UK
                [2 ]Centre for Research in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour, Department of Life Sciences, University of Roehampton , London, UK
                [3 ]Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, SRUC , Easter Bush, Midlothian, UK
                [4 ]Department of Agriculture, Horticulture and Engineering Sciences, SRUC , Easter Bush, Midlothian, UK
                [5 ]School of Natural & Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
                Author notes

                Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5001071.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5913-7912
                Article
                rsif20200086
                10.1098/rsif.2020.0086
                7328393
                32517633
                590b311c-3ca5-415f-924d-db4ce415fe8b
                © 2020 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 6 February 2020
                : 19 May 2020
                Funding
                Funded by: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000268;
                Award ID: BB/N010361/1
                Categories
                1004
                22
                44
                Life Sciences–Engineering interface
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                June, 2020

                Life sciences
                animal welfare,bioacoustics,iceberg indicator,precision livestock farming,gallus gallus domesticus

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