On the Use of a Simple Physical System Analogy to Study Robustness Features in Animal Sciences

Environmental perturbations can affect the health, welfare, and fitness of animals. Being able to characterize and phenotype adaptive capacity is therefore of growing scientific concern in animal ecology and in animal production sciences. Terms borrowed from physics are commonly used to describe adaptive responses of animals facing an environmental perturbation, but no quantitative characterization of these responses has been made. Modeling the dynamic responses to an acute challenge was used in this study to facilitate the characterization of adaptive capacity and therefore robustness. A simple model based on a spring and damper was developed to simulate the dynamic responses of animals facing an acute challenge. The parameters characterizing the spring and the damper can be interpreted in terms of stiffness and resistance to the change of the system. The model was tested on physiological and behavioral responses of rainbow trout facing an acute confinement challenge. The model has proven to properly fit the different responses measured in this study and to quantitatively describe the different temporal patterns for each statistical individual in the study. It provides therefore a new way to explicitly describe, analyze and compare responses of individuals facing an acute perturbation. This study suggests that such physical models may be usefully applied to characterize robustness in many other biological systems.