background; feather waste is generated in large amounts as a by-product of commercial poultry processing. the main component of feather is keratin. the main purpose of this study was to identify bacillus spp. (the keratinolytic bacteria) that are able to degrade the feather for producing keratin. methods; bacillus spp. were isolated from the waste of poultries located in miyaneh city. the bacte...

The time budgets, behavior rhythms, foraging habitats and food preferences of oriental white stork Ciconia boyciana were studied from December 2013 to March 2014 with instantaneous scan sampling and focus animal sampling methods at Poyang Lake, Jiangxi province, China. The results showed that the main behavior of oriental white stork were resting (40.07±3.21%) and foraging (35.44±2.42%), follow...

Chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) learn to peck soon after hatching and then peck in rapid bursts or bouts with intervals of non-pecking activity. The food sources may be static such as seeds and chick crumb, or mobile such as a mealworm. Here, changes with age in pecking toward chick crumb and a mealworm were measured. Chicks were reared in pairs and their pecking of crumb food was video recor...

Spatial variation in lighting environments frequently leads to population variation in colour patterns, colour preferences and visual systems. Yet lighting conditions also vary diurnally, and many aspects of visual systems and behaviour vary over this time scale. Here, we use the bluefin killifish (Lucania goodei) to compare how diurnal variation and habitat variation (clear versus tannin-stain...

Powerful digital image editing tools make it very easy to produce a perfect image forgery. The feather operation is necessary when tampering an image by copy-paste operation because it can help the boundary of pasted object to blend smoothly and unobtrusively with its surroundings. We propose a blind technique capable of detecting traces of feather operation to expose image forgeries. We model ...

A key challenge to the application of continent-wide feather isoscapes for geographic assignment of migrant birds is the lack of ground-truthed samples. This is especially true for long-distance Palearctic-Afrotropical migrants. We used spatially-explicit information on the δ2H composition of archived feathers from Green-backed/Grey-backed Camaroptera, to create a feather δ2H isoscape for sub-S...

Homeoproteins are functionally involved in pattern formation. Recently, homeoproteins have been shown to be distributed in a graded fashion in developing limb buds. Here we examine the expression of homeoproteins in chicken feather development by immunocytochemical localization. We find that XlHbox 1 antigen is present in cell nuclei and is distributed in a gradient in the mesoderm of developin...

Non-iridescent structural plumage color is typically produced by coherent scattering of light within a matrix of keratin and air (a ;spongy layer') in feather barbs. It remains unclear what role, if any, the basal melanin layer underlying this spongy layer plays in the production of coloration. Amelanism in birds with structural color is a ;natural experiment' in which melanin pigmentation is l...

Pigeons were given a small, immediate food reinforcement for pecking a key, and a larger, delayed reinforcement for not pecking this key. Most subjects pecked the key on more than 95% of trials. However, when pecking a differently colored key at an earlier time prevented this option from becoming available, three of 10 subjects consistently pecked it, thereby forcing themselves to wait for the ...