Date:October 19, 2015
Source:Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University
Plotting on a grid just how a chicken walks may one day give farmers more insight into how best to protect their flock from non-airborne pathogens that can also hurt their profit.
"What this mathematical model tells you at this minute is how a chicken walks, meaning its pattern, how it moves around a pen," said Dr. Arni S.R. Srinivasa Rao, a mathematical modeler in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.
"It's a first step in learning more about how they spread infection and how best to address that," said Rao, corresponding author of a study in Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences.
While the resulting complex series of letters, numbers and symbols Rao has developed are likely a mystery to non-math aficionados, they basically show, not the gait, but the walk patterns of the chicken in a pen. Laid out on a grid, the paths chickens take from say the corner of the pen to the food bowl and back, look like a colorful albeit confusing racetrack. But by plotting the patterns and multiplying them by the number of chickens in a pen, the mathematical model may help clarify quite literally how many ways/times chickens cross each other's path -- and re-cross their own -- and the likelihood of disease spread that results.
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