Behavioral sensors attached to wild boars have been used to detect when animals are sick with African Swine Fever, a fatal viral disease that affects both boar and domestic pigs. Accelerometer sensors, which measure tiny changes in movement, showed that wild boars reduced their daily activity by up to 20% when infected with the virus.
The findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, show that lightweight sensors can detect sickness behavior in wild boar—raising the possibility of a minimally invasive tool to assist in the control and prevention of African Swine Fever.
Although the virus cannot be transmitted to humans, African Swine Fever is a major threat to the global pig industry and has significant economic and social impact. The highly contagious virus spreads easily between wild boar and domestic pigs, and so knowing when a disease outbreak occurs in the wild and on farms is important for curbing the spread of African Swine Fever. But detecting disease in wild animals is not straight forward.
Currently, testing for African Swine Fever in wild boar is done by sampling animals that are either hunted or found dead, which creates a long lag between when the disease emerges in a population to when it is actually detected.
Seeking to reduce this lag, scientists from Germany, Spain and Austria teamed up to investigate whether technology that “reads” an animal’s behavior could be harnessed for early detection of disease in wild boar. Their findings point to the potential of accelerometer sensors as an accessible tool that can support the existing disease management approaches for African Swine Fever surveillance and control.
2023-09-13 01:24:03
Link from phys.org