Adaptation to hot climate and strategies to alleviate heat stress in livestock production.

By D. Renaudeau, A. Collin, S. Yahav, V. D. Basilio, J. Gourdine, R. Collier. Animal, 2012

915 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite many challenges faced by animal producers, including environmental problems, diseases, economic pressure, and feed availability, it is still predicted that animal production in developing countries will continue to sustain the future growth of the world's meat production. In these areas, livestock performance is generally lower than those obtained in Western Europe and North America. Although many factors can be involved, climatic factors are among the first and crucial limiting factors of the development of animal production in warm regions. In addition, global warming will further accentuate heat stress-related problems. The objective of this paper was to review the effective strategies to alleviate heat stress in the context of tropical livestock production systems. These strategies can be classified into three groups: those increasing feed intake or decreasing metabolic heat production, those enhancing heat-loss capacities, and those involving genetic selection for heat tolerance. Under heat stress, improved production should be possible through modifications of diet composition that either promotes a higher intake or compensates the low feed consumption. In addition, altering feeding management such as a change in feeding time and/or frequency, are efficient tools to avoid excessive heat load and improve survival rate, especially in poultry. Methods to enhance heat exchange between the environment and the animal and those changing the environment to prevent or limit heat stress can be used to improve performance under hot climatic conditions. Although differences in thermal tolerance exist between livestock species (ruminants > monogastrics), there are also large differences between breeds of a species and within each breed. Consequently, the opportunity may exist to improve thermal tolerance of the animals using genetic tools. However, further research is required to quantify the genetic antagonism between adaptation and production traits to evaluate the potential selection response. With the development of molecular biotechnologies, new opportunities are available to characterize gene expression and identify key cellular responses to heat stress. These new tools will enable scientists to improve the accuracy and the efficiency of selection for heat tolerance. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression and thermal imprinting of the genome could also be an efficient method to improve thermal tolerance. Such techniques (e.g. perinatal heat acclimation) are currently being experimented in chicken.

Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Ecology, Small Animals

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aad9b29a831dd8599e34b4f9aedb66691f08c92c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Animal Science and Zoology

1. M. A. V. von Keyserlingk
2. L. Polsky
3. U. Bernabucci

In Small Animals

1. M. A. V. von Keyserlingk
2. L. Polsky

Citations in the corpus

• Impact of Heat Stress on Poultry Production (2013, background): “Environmental stressors, such as heat stress, are particularly detrimental to animal agriculture [2–4].”
• Impact of heat stress and nutritional interventions on poultry production (2018, background): “Diet formulations need to maintain water balance, nutrients and electrolytes intake and/or satisfy specific needs 654 World's Poultry Science Journal, Vol. 74, December 2018 during heat stress such as vitamins and minerals (Renaudeau et al., 2012), which regulates the balance of electrolyte and ETC.”
• Physiological and biochemical blood variables of goats subjected to heat stress – a review (2018, neutral): “The initial response of an animal to heat stress is the increasing of its respiratory rate, causing loss of heat by evaporation (Renaudeau et al. 2012).”
• Invited review: Effects of heat stress on dairy cattle welfare. (2017, background): “…global temperatures (Schär et al., 2004) combined with global increases in the number of production animals and the intensification of agriculture (Renaudeau et al., 2012), including (but not limited to) that in emerging economies (von Keyserlingk and Hötzel, 2015), has resulted in heat stress…”
• Feeding and nutrition management of heat-stressed dairy ruminants (2018, background): “An improved resistance against HS in pigs supplemented with selenium and vitamin E was reported in the review of Renaudeau et al. (2012).”