Motivation for the Blackdown Bio-logging Project
Monitoring individual sheep poses a significant challenge as individuals often spend long periods with little or no direct contact with the farmer. This means it is hard to monitor the health and production (e.g. growth, reproduction) of sheep and the UK sheep industry faces a major challenge in improving both of these outcomes.
Current practices
Current breeding efforts in sheep have tended to focus on traits expressed in lambs and rams. In contrast, the behaviour and health of ewes have been largely neglected by breeding programs. The behaviour of individuals and, in social species, the collective behaviour of groups is likely to have a substantial effect on their health and production. This is clearly established in studies on wild animal populations where behaviour has strong impacts on both survival and reproduction. To date, however, very little is known about the relationship between behaviour, health and production in sheep and sheep breeding programs are missing an opportunity to improve the health and performance of ewes (because there is little information on ewe health and behaviour on which to base breeding decisions).
Potential for Improvements
Recent technological developments open up the opportunity for a change in the measurement of ewe health and behaviour. Our smartphones, for example, constantly track our activity (e.g. walking), where we are and who we come into contact with. In this project we are harnessing the latest in high-tech measurement technology for automatically recording behaviour (bio-logging). We are using accelerometers to automatically record behaviour and health and proximity tags to record patterns of social behaviour. Using these data we will determine the relationships between behaviour, health and production and identify new traits that underpin maternal ability, lamb growth and reproductive success. We will identify which of these are heritable traits that can be selected for by farmers to improve the health and production of their ewes. The project may be further developed by using genomic techniques to identify genetic markers of behaviour, health and production traits that can be used for genomic selection to improve the productivity, health and welfare of ewes.
By working directly with Great Garlandhayes farm and other progressive sheep farms this project will address some of the biggest challenges facing the UK sheep industry and has clear potential to make substantial improvements to welfare and production.