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The author discusses the effectiveness of breeding program on domesticated animals in response to the preservation on wild life worldwide. He emphasizes that the survival of most endangered species and animals are already critical not only in the country as will as worldwide. He offers various techniques on how to preserve wild life animals such as frozen semen, artificial insemination, superovulation, and embryo transplant. He presents few of the endangered animals that need preservation including Tasmanian wolf, Aribian oryx, Philippine eagle, and Sumatran rhinoceros. He added, that by using the technique, it develop a better breeding program for the preservation of the endangered wild life.

For some endangered parrot species, captive breeding may be the only insurance for their survival. However, many individuals in captivity do not reproduce. Artificial insemination (AI) may help overcome reproductive failures or geographic distance. For semen collection in birds, massage is the most commonly used method. However, this process, which usually requires capture and restraint, involves risk of stress and injuries. The aim of this experiment was to train large macaws to accept the physical manipulations of their body parts needed for the artificial insemination process. Within 15 weeks, a male and a female Buffon's macaw (Ara ambiguus) learned to accept handling without apparent stress. A pair of green-winged macaws (Ara chloropterus) progressed more slowly and displayed some signs of stress. This stress highlights the need to monitor the birds' possible signs of discomfort during the training in order to adapt the working protocol. These results demonstrate that it is possible to train the AI behaviors, thus avoiding the capture, restraint, and anesthesia. An added benefit to this is the potential for the training to provide a form of behavioral enrichment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nuptial feeding is an important part of mating in several arthropods including some spiders. A male can contribute via the nuptial gift to his own offspring (paternal investment) and/or the nuptial gift may allow him to better transfer sperm or to make the female more willing to copulate (mating effort). From the female's perspective, however, weighing a male's quality according to the presence of a gift should coincide with her mating status, because male rejection by the virgin female may decrease her fitness by increasing the likelihood of remaining unmated. Therefore, female mate choice would depend on her mating status and virgin females are expected to be less choosy than mated females. I examined this hypothesis in the nursery web spider, Pisaura mirabilis , in which females are polyandrous and mate both with males with and without a gift. I found no support for my hypothesis; instead the presence of a gift was crucial in accomplishing successful copulation regardless of female mating status. Interestingly, sexual size dimorphism was found to be a significant predictor for duration of copulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the effect of dietary vitamin E supplementation on fertilising ability of pheasant semen following artificial insemination. Sperm storage enhancing effect of alpha-tocopherol; Age of the birds; Number of fertilized eggs after artificial insemination (AI); Percent egg fertility; Percent decline of egg fertility during second week following AI.