High lick rate is maintained throughout spontaneous liquid meals in freely feeding rats

To investigate the microstructure of spontaneous meals in freely feeding rats, 16 adult male Sprague Dawley rats were housed individually in custom-designed lickometer cages and maintained on a milk diet. Licks were recorded over 23 h at millisecond accuracy via a computer-controlled lickometer. Analysis of lick data revealed an average of about 12 discrete meals/day occurring mainly during the dark phase. The most striking feature of both dark and light meals was the maintenance of a high initial rate of licking until an abrupt decline at the end of the meal. This pattern of licking is very different from the exponential decay of lick rate reported in scheduled test meals of palatable solutions. Thus, the microstructure of licking for meals is affected in an apparently fundamental way by whether a meal is scheduled or spontaneous, suggesting a basic difference in the underlying physiologic controls.