Nutritional control of reproduction in female goats

Mashitah Shikh Maidin

    Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

    1109 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    [Truncated abstract] Livestock production efficiency depends greatly on nutritional management for reproductive efficiency (‘focus feeding’), as embodied in the concept of ‘clean, green and ethical management’. As reported in sheep studies, changes in the levels of nutrition primarily affect the centres that control energy homeostasis, most of which seem to be based in the preoptic-hypothalamic continuum. Nutritional supplements thus affect a range of blood-borne metabolic factors that appear to exert direct and indirect effects on reproductive performance through actions on the hypothalamic-pituitaryovarian axis. In sheep, an increase in feed intake during the pre-ovulatory follicular phase changes ovarian function leading to an increase in ovulation rate but, during the first two weeks of pregnancy, the supplement can also cause a significant reduction in pregnancy rate due to an increase in the catabolism and clearance of progesterone by the liver. The similarities between sheep and goats in their basic reproductive biology suggest that the same responses would be seen in female goats. However, there has been little experimentation in goats compared to sheep, so we know almost nothing for goats about the effects of nutritional supplements on the feed-forward-feedback loops in either the reproductive axis or the metabolic homeostatic systems. This thesis describes four experiments that test hypotheses concerning the effect of a nutritional supplement (lupin grain) on the reproductive and metabolic systems of Australian Cashmere female goats.
    Original languageEnglish
    QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
    Publication statusUnpublished - 2011

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