AALAS 2018
Wednesday, November 14th, 2018
The Gaskill lab had a lot of fun at the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) 2018 National Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. This is the largest gathering of laboratory animal professionals in the world, with over 4500 attendees! Our lab and collaborators presented two 2.5 hour sessions on two very different but important topics:…
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Summer Conference Fun: ISAE 2018
Thursday, August 30th, 2018
The Gaskill Lab had a lot of fun this year attending the International Society for Applied Ethology International Conference in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Dr. Brianna Gaskill, Megan LaFollette, and Rebecca Smith attended from our current lab. We also met up with former graduate student Amy Robinson-Junker. Even more, we saw our academic great grandmother…
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Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference 2018
Thursday, April 19th, 2018
The Gaskill lab had a strong showing at the 2018 Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference. Three of our undergraduate research assistant students participated. Megan Riley presented a poster titled “Exploring tickling dosage: Do frequency and duration matter?” Katie Bachert presented a poster titled “Is bigger always better? Assessing the effect of cage space on mouse welfare?”…
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Mouse scents & aggression
Friday, March 30th, 2018
Amanda is almost ready to start collecting data for her first PhD project exploring the scent deposits on mouse nesting material. It is speculated that scent cues preserved on the nest contribute to maintaining the stability of the social hierarchy in cages of male mice. She is collaborating with the Purdue Proteomics Facility and the…
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Pig Scratching
Wednesday, February 21st, 2018
Rebecca Smith, first year master’s student, began her first project on sow enrichment. She is the first to explore scratching materials as a potential enrichment in sow gestation pens and farrowing crates. Enrichments have been proven to improve welfare. Scratching enrichment may engage the sows’ natural scratching behavior and curiosity.
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