Olfactory contributions to dehydration-induced anorexia in weanling rats

By 20 days of age, dehydration produces a clear anorexia, even though weanling rats have had only limited feeding and drinking experience. Their lack of ingestive experience makes weanlings good subjects for studying the physiological mechanisms subserving anorexic phenomena because learned contributions are unlikely to add significant complications. Twenty-day-old rats dehydrated by hypertonic saline injection were anorexic when offered milk or solid food (rat chow), but not when offered sucrose solutions (Experiment I). However, when the scent of almond was associated with sucrose solutions, or with water, intake of these solutions was depressed by dehydration (Experiment II). Thus for dehydrated rats, olfactory stimulation may help produce dehydration-induced anorexia. Making rats anosmic by intransal lavage with ZnSO4 (Experiment III) eliminated the anorexia to almond-scented water and partially eliminated that to milk. For these fluids, an odor cue seems a requirement for the occurrence of dehydration-anorexia. In Experiment IV, we found that dehydration-anorexia did not occur when milk was infused directly into pups' mouths. This finding suggests that the inhibitory process mediating dehydration-anorexia influences the approach to food and not the actual consumatory response that occurs once food is in the mouth. The inhibition of feeding produced by dehydration, therefore, may depend largely on olfactory cues, and seems to operate at a distance, as rats locate and approach food.