What makes a good mother? Savannah Millburn, a master’s student in animal breeding and genetics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is trying to find out through her research project utilizing the NUtrack animal monitoring system.
NUtrack is a deep-learning, computer camera system that can identify and track individual animals within a pen. Behaviors that NUtrack can identify include incidence of sitting, standing, laying, time at the feeder/waterer, distance traveled and average walking speed.
“From this, we can obviously take the data in a lot of different directions, whether that be nutrition, physiology, various other disciplines,” Millburn says. Her discipline is quantitative genetics.
Millburn gave a lightning talk at the recent National Swine Improvement Federation meeting in St. Louis, Mo., discussing her project under the supervision of Benny Mote, an assistant professor and Swine Extension Specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
She will use NUtrack to identify early-life social behavior in pigs. Her goal is to analyze the connection between behavior during the growing stage and mothering ability of sows. From this, she hopes to identify traits that can be used to select replacement females at an earlier phase of life.
“What we’re going to be utilizing from the NUtrack system is data that basically says how often pigs are together and different behaviors such as reciprocal fighting, aggressive behavior like tail biting, and also if they spend a lot of time by themselves or not,” she says. “How does that translate when they’re in the crate? Does that make better mothers or worse mothers?”
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