A pilot study on the ontogeny of digestive physiology in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata)

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• 作者：Akiko Sawada ; Ei Sakaguchi ; Marcus Clauss ; Goro Hanya
• 关键词：Body size ; Digesta passage time ; Mean retention time ; Digestibility ; Gut capacity
• 刊名：Mammalian Biology - Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde
• 出版年：2012
• 出版时间：November, 2012
• 年：2012
• 卷：77
• 期：6
• 页码：455-458
• 全文大小：227 K

文摘

An assumption based on the Jarman-Bell principle suggests a positive relationship between body size and the digestive efficiency in animals, where smaller animals are less effective at digesting fibrous food due to shorter digesta passage. To examine the effect of body size within a species and explore a potential physiological background of ontogenetic diet shifts, we measured food intake, digestibility, digesta passage and gut fill in nine Japanese macaques, including three juveniles/subadult animals. Although these three showed a comparable digestive efficiency as the older animals on a low-fiber diet, they did not achieve the long retention times of adults in spite of similar levels of indigestible food intake and gut capacity. While the limited sample size would not allow generalized conclusions on ontogenetic digestive development in primates, this study suggests additional, yet unexplored effects other than food intake, digestion and gut capacity on digesta retention during ontogeny.