Influence of handler relationships and experience on health parameters, glucocorticoid responses and behaviour of semi-captive Asian elephants.

Declining wild populations combined with accumulating captive populations of e.g. livestock, pets, draught and zoo animals have resulted in some threatened species with substantial proportions of their populations in captivity. The interactions animals have with humans in captivity depend on handler familiarity and relationship quality and can affect animal health, growth and reproduction with consequences for the success of conservation programmes. However, assessments of how specific human-animal relationships affect a range of physiological and behavioural outcomes are rare. Here, we studied semi-captive Asian elephants with detailed records of elephant-handler (mahout) relationships and veterinary management, allowing assessment of multiple welfare indicators in relation to specific mahout-elephant relationship lengths and mahout experience. These included measures of physiological stress (faecal glucocorticoid metabolite [FGM], heterophil:lymphocyte ratio [H:L]), muscle damage (creatine kinase [CK]), immunological health (total white blood cell count [TWBC]) and behaviour (response to mahout verbal commands). We found no evidence that FGM or H:L related to aspects of the mahout-elephant relationship. Longer overall mahout experience (i.e. years of being a mahout) was linked to increased muscle damage and inflammation, but the lengths of specific mahout-elephant relationships were inversely associated with muscle damage in working-age elephants. Elephants responded more to familiar mahouts in behavioural tasks and faster to mahouts they had known for longer. In summary, our results found little evidence that the mahout-elephant relationship affects physiological stress in this population based on FGM and H:L, but mahout experience and relationships were linked to other physiological responses (CK, TWBC), and elephants require behavioural adjustment periods following mahout changes.

High-energy, ceramic-disk Yb:LuAG laser amplifier.

We report the first short-pulse amplification results to several hundred millijoule energies in ceramic Yb:LuAG. We have demonstrated ns-pulse output from a diode-pumped Yb:LuAG amplifier at a maximum energy of 580 mJ and a peak optical-to-optical efficiency of 28% at 550 mJ. In cavity dumped operation of a nanosecond oscillator we obtained 1 mJ at up to 100 Hz repetition rate. A gain bandwidth of 5.4 nm was achieved at room temperature by measuring the small-signal single-pass gain. Furthermore, we compared our results with Yb:YAG within the same amplifier system.

Isolation of region specific single-copy probes from human chromosome 1q23-->1q25.

Single-copy sequences of chromosome bands 1q23-->1q25 were enriched by subtractive hybridization of digoxigenin oligonucleotide-labeled DNA from a somatic cell hybrid containing human chromosome 1 with DNA from a somatic cell hybrid containing a deleted human chromosome 1, del(1)(q23q25). These sequences were purified with an immobilized anti-digoxigenin antibody, amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and cloned. The majority of clones contained single-copy sequences, thus allowing direct screening of human genomic DNA. With pools of probes complex hybridization patterns as well as differences in hybridization patterns between genomes were observed in Southern blotting experiments. Nine clones containing independent single-copy sequences from chromosome bands 1q23-->1q25 were isolated and sequenced to generate sequence-tagged sites (STSs). Using PCR, region specific genomic clones containing large inserts were identified in human genomic lambda phage and cosmid libraries. Thus, region specific genomic probes generated by genomic difference cloning are useful for identifying deletions and rearrangements, for generating STSs and for isolating genomic clones containing large inserts of a particular chromosomal region.