Nest Building as an Indicator of Health and Welfare in Laboratory Mice

The minimization and alleviation of  suffering has moral and scientific implications. In order to mitigate this  negative experience one must be able to ...

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats

Handling small animals such as rats can lead to several adverse effects. These include the fear of humans, resistance to handling, increased injury risk ...

charles river

Purdue University

Environmental enrichment of laboratory mice can improve the quality of research, but debate arises over the means of enrichment and its ability to be used in a sterile environment. One important form of enrichment is nesting material. Mice in the wild build dome-shaped, complex, multilayered nests, but this behavior is not seen in the laboratory, perhaps due to inappropriate nesting material rather than the nest-building ability of the mice. Here we focus on the use of naturalistic nesting materials to test whether they improve nest quality through the use of a 'naturalistic nest score' system; we also focus on materials that can be sterilized and easily used in existing housing systems. We first determined whether C57BL/6J mice build naturalistic nests when given shredded paper strips. We then compared these shredded paper strips with other commonly used nesting enrichments (facial tissues and compressed cotton squares). Nests were scored for 6 d. We found that the shredded paper strips allowed the mice to build higher quality nests than those built with any of the other materials. Nests built with tissues were of intermediate quality, and nests built with compressed cotton squares were of poor quality, similar to those built by the control group. These results suggest that C57BL/6J mice given appropriate nesting materials can build nests similar to those built by their wild counterparts.

Home improvement: C57BL/6J mice given more naturalistic nesting materials build better nests.

Operant and maze tasks in mice are limited by the small number of trials possible in a session before mice lose motivation. We hypothesized that by manipulating reward size and session length, motivation, and hence performance, would be maintained in an automated T-maze. We predicted that larger rewards and shorter sessions would improve acquisition; and smaller rewards and shorter sessions would maintain higher and less variable performance. Eighteen C57BL/6J mice (9 per sex) acquired (criterion 8/10 correct) and performed a spatial discrimination, with one of 3 reward sizes (.02, .04, or .08 g) and one of 3 session schedules (15, 30, or 45 min sessions). Each mouse had a total of 360 min of access to the maze per night, for two nights, and averaged 190 trials. Analysis used split-plot GLM with contrasts testing for linear effects. Acquisition of the discrimination was unaffected by reward size or session length/interval. After-criterion average performance improved as reward size decreased. After-criterion variability in performance was also affected. Variability increased as reward size increased. Session length/interval did not affect any outcome. We conclude that an automated maze, with suitable reward sizes, can sustain performance with low variability, at 5-10 times faster than traditional methods.

Little and often? Maintaining continued performance in an automated T-maze for mice.

In laboratories, mice are housed at 20-24°C, which is below their lower critical temperature (≈30°C). This increased thermal stress has the potential to alter scientific outcomes. Nesting material should allow for improved behavioral thermoregulation and thus alleviate this thermal stress. Nesting behavior should change with temperature and material, and the choice between nesting or thermotaxis (movement in response to temperature) should also depend on the balance of these factors, such that mice titrate nesting material against temperature. Naïve CD-1, BALB/c, and C57BL/6 mice (36 male and 36 female/strain in groups of 3) were housed in a set of 2 connected cages, each maintained at a different temperature using a water bath. One cage in each set was 20°C (Nesting cage; NC) while the other was one of 6 temperatures (Temperature cage; TC: 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, or 35°C). The NC contained one of 6 nesting provisions (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10g), changed daily. Food intake and nest scores were measured in both cages. As the difference in temperature between paired cages increased, feed consumption in NC increased. Nesting provision altered differences in nest scores between the 2 paired temperatures. Nest scores in NC increased with increasing provision. In addition, temperature pairings altered the difference in nest scores with the smallest difference between locations at 26°C and 29°C. Mice transferred material from NC to TC but the likelihood of transfer decreased with increasing provision. Overall, mice of different strains and sexes prefer temperatures between 26-29°C and the shift from thermotaxis to nest building is seen between 6 and 10 g of material. Our results suggest that under normal laboratory temperatures, mice should be provided with no less than 6 grams of nesting material, but up to 10 grams may be needed to alleviate thermal distress under typical temperatures.

Heat or insulation: behavioral titration of mouse preference for warmth or access to a nest.

In laboratories, mice are housed at 20-24 °C, which is below their lower critical temperature (≈30 °C). Thus, mice are potentially cold stressed, which can alter metabolism, immune function, and reproduction. These physiological changes reflect impaired wellbeing, and affect scientific outcomes. We hypothesized that nesting material would allow mice to alleviate cold stress by controlling their thermal microenvironment, thus insulating them, reducing heat loss and thermogenic processes. Naïve C57BL/6, CD-1, and BALB/c mice (24 male and 24 female/strain in groups of 3) were housed in standard cages at 20 °C either with or without 8 g nesting material for 4 weeks. Core body temperature was followed using intraperitoneal radio telemetry. The thermal properties of the nests were assessed using a thermal imaging camera, and related to nest quality. Higher scoring nests were negatively correlated with the mean radiated temperature and were thus more insulating. No effects of nesting material on body temperature were found. CD-1 mice with nesting material had higher end body weights than controls. No effect was seen in the other two strains. Mice with the telemetry implant had larger spleens than controls, possibly indicating an immune response to the implant or low level infection from the surgery. BALB/c mice express less mRNA for the UCP1 protein than mice without nesting material. This indicates that BALB/c's with nesting material do not utilize their brown fat to create heat as readily as controls. Nests can alleviate thermal discomfort by decreasing the amount of radiated heat and reduce the need for non-shivering thermogenesis. However, different strains appear to use different behavioral (through different primary modes of behavioral thermoregulation) and physiological strategies (utilizing thermogenesis to different degrees) to maintain a constant body temperature under cool standard laboratory ambient temperatures.

Impact of nesting material on mouse body temperature and physiology.

Mice are housed at temperatures (20-26 °C) that increase their basal metabolic rates and impose high energy demands to maintain core temperatures. Therefore, energy must be reallocated from other biological processes to increase heat production to offset heat loss. Supplying laboratory mice with nesting material may provide sufficient insulation to reduce heat loss and improve both feed conversion and breeding performance. Naïve C57BL/6, BALB/c, and CD-1 breeding pairs were provided with bedding alone, or bedding supplemented with either 8 g of Enviro-Dri, 8 g of Nestlets, for 6 months. Mice provided with either nesting material built more dome-like nests than controls. Nesting material improved feed efficiency per pup weaned as well as pup weaning weight. The breeding index (pups weaned/dam/week) was higher when either nesting material was provided. Thus, the sparing of energy for thermoregulation of mice given additional nesting material may have been responsible for the improved breeding and growth of offspring.

Energy reallocation to breeding performance through improved nest building in laboratory mice.

Memory deficits associated with hippocampal dysfunction are a key feature of a number of neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders. The discrete-trial rewarded alternation T-maze task is highly sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction. Normal mice have spontaneously high levels of alternation, whereas hippocampal-lesioned mice are dramatically impaired. However, this is a hand-run task and handling has been shown to impact crucially on behavioural responses, as well as being labour-intensive and therefore unsuitable for high-throughput studies. To overcome this, a fully automated maze was designed. The maze was attached to the mouse's home cage and the subject earned all of its food by running through the maze. In this study the hippocampal dependence of rewarded alternation in the automated maze was assessed. Bilateral hippocampal-lesioned mice were assessed in the standard, hand-run, discrete-trial rewarded alternation paradigm and in the automated paradigm, according to a cross-over design. A similarly robust lesion effect on alternation performance was found in both mazes, confirming the sensitivity of the automated maze to hippocampal lesions. Moreover, the performance of the animals in the automated maze was not affected by their handling history whereas performance in the hand-run maze was affected by prior testing history. By having more stable performance and by decreasing human contact the automated maze may offer opportunities to reduce extraneous experimental variation and therefore increase the reproducibility within and/or between laboratories. Furthermore, automation potentially allows for greater experimental throughput and hence suitability for use in assessment of cognitive function in drug discovery.

Brianna N. Gaskill

Research Models and Services

charles river

Nest Building as an Indicator of Health and Welfare in Laboratory Mice

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats

Brianna N. Gaskill

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Research Models and Services

charles river

Nest Building as an Indicator of Health and Welfare in Laboratory Mice

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats

Research Models and Services