ALBERT

Description: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of four local anesthetics on pain relief during surgical castration under standardized conditions in conscious piglets. Therefore, 71 male piglets (three to seven days) were distributed into control groups (handling, castration without anesthesia or analgesia) and local anesthetic trial groups (procaine, lidocaine, bupivacaine, mepivacaine). Then, 20 min prior to castration, animals of the treatment groups, except piglets in the handling group, received an injection of a local anesthetic or sodium chloride of 0.5 mL intratesticularly and 0.5 mL subscrotally. During injection and castration, defensive behavior was evaluated. Locomotor activity, as well as postoperative bleeding, wound healing and average daily weight gain were assessed to detect side effects. The injection caused increased defensive movements, significantly in the bupivacaine group. Lidocaine and mepivacaine significantly reduced defensive movements during castration, and procaine and bupivacaine only during severing of the spermatic cord. Impairments of locomotor activity were found in piglets injected with lidocaine, bupivacaine or sodium chloride. Considering healing, bleeding and weight gain, no negative impacts were observed. In conclusion, lidocaine and mepivacaine were able to achieve significant pain relief during the castration procedure, whereas procaine and bupivacaine only during the severing of the spermatic cord. Moreover, the injection of bupivacaine seemed to be painful itself.

Description: Background Pituitary dwarfism (PD) in German Shepherd dogs (GSD) is a rare endocrinopathy. Cause and inheritance of the disease are well characterized, but the overall survival time, presence of concurrent diseases, quality of life (QoL) and influence of different treatment options on those parameters is still not well investigated. The aim of this study was to obtain data regarding the disease pattern of GSD with PD and to investigate the impact of treatment. Methods 47 dogs with dwarfism (presumably PD) and 94 unaffected GSD serving as controls were enrolled. Data were collected via a standardized questionnaire, which every owner of a participating dog had completed. Dogs with PD were grouped based on three categories of treatment: Group 1 (untreated), group 2 (treated with levothyroxine), group 3 (treated with thyroxine and progestogens or with growth hormone (GH)). Groups were compared using One-Way-Anova, Kruskal-Wallis test or Wilcoxon-rank-sum test. Categorical analysis was performed using Two-Sample-Chi-Squared-test. Results Dogs treated with thyroxine and gestagen or GH were significantly taller and heavier compared to all other dogs with PD. Quality of life was best in dogs with PD treated with thyroxine and similar to unaffected GSD. Treatment increased survival time in dogs with PD independent of the treatment strategy. Dogs receiving thyroxine and progestogens or GH did not develop chronic kidney disease (CKD). Conclusion GSD with PD should be treated at least for their secondary hypothyroidism to increase survival time. Additional treatment with progestogens or GH improves body size and seems to protect against the occurrence of CKD.

Description: Marine microorganisms are responsible for roughly half of the Earth’s primary production, circa half of the carbon dioxide sink and oxygen production on Earth. Marine plankton organisms are an important part of global biogeochemical models, which simulate the effects of current global change, e.g., increased CO2 levels, increased temperature, or increased eutrophication on ecosystem functioning and community dynamics. However, such models rarely account for the adaptation of marine microorganisms, which are able to evolve rapidly. While some global models deal with the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity, they do not account for speciation. Due to a highly unstructured marine environment with no clear boundaries, understanding sympatric speciation, which is the speciation without geographic isolation, in plankton is particularly important. However, sympatric speciation in terrestrial systems has gained much more attention while in marine systems it was largely ignored. The most famous example of sympatric speciation are Darwin’s finches, which diversified by specialisation on different resources. But despite the large number of existing speciation models, a concrete mechanism which allows for sympatric speciation via specialisation, as suggested by Darwin, has been difficult to pin down. Therefore, in the first part of the thesis we propose a concrete mechanism of sympatric speciation via specialisation and resource partitioning allowing predators to reduce competition and create new ecological niches. The key to this mechanism are the reduced costs in the specialisation trade-off, whereby the improved ability to eat the preferred prey (gain) over-compensates the reduced ability to eat the less-preferred prey (cost). Such "plus-zero sum game” increases the grazing pressure on prey, which in turn may respond by changing traits, e.g., the specific growth rate, in order to escape the grazing pressure. Building on this mechanism, in the second part of the thesis we explore sympatric speciation in the face of simultaneous co-evolution of a prey trait (growth rate) and a predator trait (specialisation) in a simple predator-prey interaction model. We find that the space defined by all combinations of predator and prey traits can be divided into three regions: (1) the speciation space, where the combinations of traits allow speciation leading to the establishment of two sympatric predator species; (2) the vanishing speciation space, i.e. the range of combinations allowing only ephemeral speciation and (3) the displacement space, where the resident predator is displaced by a single mutant. We also introduce and discuss some further novel concepts, e.g., evolutionary time landscape, speciation threshold and prey-equality space. We conclude that prey species can adjust traits as a response to increased predation. This raises the question of how both trophic levels would adapt to changing environmental conditions. While some studies investigated the evolutionary response of marine plankton to increased temperature, CO2 and acidification, changes in the marine biodiversity as a consequence of increased nutrient concentration (i.e. eutrophication) has not been intensively studied yet. Moreover, the density-independent mortality (DIM) in the ocean was largely ignored and not treated separately from the grazing mortality. Hence, in the third part of the thesis we examine the occurrence of sympatric speciation and the dynamics of a marine plankton community as a function of three changing quantities: environmental nutrient load, DIM of phytoplankton, and adaptive specialisation of zooplankton. Particularly we study the coevolution of plankton and the resource use efficiency in a four-species predator-prey interaction model at different environmental nutrient concentrations and density-independent mortalities of the prey. The results imply that increasing nutrient concentration in our model: (1) promotes biodiversity, (2) decreases the effect of DIM of phytoplankton on biodiversity, (3) changes domination from prey species to predators, and (4) decreases overall system productivity. This thesis emphasises the importance of traits and trade-offs for understanding the adaptive behavior of marine plankton. Fast evolutionary changes and density-independent crashes of populations in marine plankton necessitate the consideration and better representation of evolutionary processes in global biogeochemical models in order to better project the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems. Sympatric speciation deserves particular attention due to the absence of clear geographic barriers in the marine environment.

Description: In marine recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) ozone is often used in combination with biofiltration for the improvement of process water quality. Especially for disinfection purposes ozone residuals are required, that lead to a fast formation of secondary oxidants in seawater, summed up as ozone-produced oxidants (OPO). We studied the impact of OPO on nitrifying biofilter bacteria in a series of laboratory batch experiments by exposing (i) cell suspensions of the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) Nitrosomonas marina strain 22 and the nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB) Nitrospira strain Ecomares 2.1, (ii) a pure culture of the NOB Nitrospira strain immobilized on biocarriers, as well as (iii) a heterogeneous biofilm culture settled on biocarriers from a marine RAS for 1 h to different OPO concentrations up to 0.6 mg/l chlorine equivalent. Subsequent activity tests detected a negative linear correlation between OPO concentration and nitrifying activity of suspended pure cultures. Immobilization on biocarriers increased the tolerance of AOB and NOB dramatically, suggesting the biofilm matrix to be highly protective against OPO. Furthermore, we investigated the chronic effect of moderate ozonation at OPO concentrations of 0, 0.05, 0.10 and 0.15 mg/l chlorine equivalent on biofilter performance in a 21 d exposure experiment using 12 experimental RAS, stocked with tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). Chronic exposure experiments could not reveal any harmful impact on biofilter performance for OPO concentrations up to 0.15 mg/l, even at continuous exposure. Surprisingly, nitrifying activity was enhanced at all OPO concentrations compared to the control without ozonation, suggesting moderate ozonation to promote biological nitrification. It can be concluded that rather health, welfare and performance of most cultivated fish species are the limiting factors for ozone dosage than nitrification performance of biofilters. The results may further have practical implications in relation to design and operational strategy of water treatment processes in RAS and might thus contribute to the optimization of an effective and safe treatment combination of biofiltration and ozonation

Description: This study was carried out to determine the prevalence of rumen flukes on German cattle farms via the sedimentation technique, and to identify the rumen fluke species occurring in Germany. Additionally, the prevalence of patent Fasciola hepatica infections was determined. Furthermore, a short questionnaire was answered by the farmers. A prevalence of 5.5% and 9.5% was detected for rumen flukes and liver flukes, respectively. Coinfections occurred on 2.1% of farms. In northern Germany, the rumen fluke prevalence was higher than in southern Germany, while for liver fluke the distribution was reversed. Rumen flukes were mostly identified as Calicophoron daubneyi, but in four cases, sequencing revealed Paramphistomum leydeni for the first time in Germany. Grazing and feeding of fresh grass, as well as organic farming, were significantly associated with rumen and liver fluke occurrence. In contrast, suckler cow husbandry only had an influence on the occurrence of rumen flukes, but not liver flukes. Trematode eggs could be detected in both, farms with and without deworming. Since there were only a few studies about Paramphistomidosis in Germany, more attention should be paid to these parasitic diseases for animal welfare and animal health reasons.

Description: At present, approximately 20 aquaculture species provide about 95% of aquaculture production (Schulz 2008). In order to encourage diversification in aquaculture, a new selection method for candidate species for aquaculture was created in this work. New candidate species were found through a comparison of aquaculture versus non-aquaculture species. Species from FAO (2007) and commercial species in FishBase (2008) were identified as current aquaculture species. All other species in FishBase ( ea. 30.000) were classified as non-aquaculture species. Key traits for aquaculture were identified. Growth was considered the most important trait for aquaculture in this study. A new growth index was created in this work and used to rank candidate species. Using key traits and comparison procedure, 225 candidates were selected among 30.000 fish species. For these 225 candidates, a new online tool was created in FishBase. The online tool enables users to select candidates for aquaculture in different countries, climate zones, trophic levels and with different growth perfonnance (http://www.fishbase.de/CSA/details.htm). The fastest growing candidates for aquaculture were introduced for lower trophic levels, for different salinities and for different climate zones.