TPC NEWS Spring 1983 Vol.2 No.1 （(Whole
Number 2)
(AN
ABRIDGED TRANSLATION)
Page-3
ESSAY
I, being in charge of this primate center, find my life here very
impressive and delightful when I receive news from the active front of the
animal quarters as well as of the laboratories.
Particularly news of the newborns brings me a great joy.
Maybe because of its serenity, but also that it is the consequence of a
carefully-b planned, scientific effort.
We have had many happenings such as the first case of birth of twin
babies, the first parturition by a F2, the first pregnancy of a monkey reared by
a cesarean sectioned mother monkey, parturition by a highest age (20 years old)
monkey, pregnancy of a youngest (3 years l month) monkey, the first parturitions
of squirrel monkey and green monkey under individual cage conditions, etc.,
Those happenings we encounter fortunately almost everyday, big or small, may
appear trivial to you. However, as
they mount up,, they enrich our knowledge and become in reality very important
data from the scientific point of view. The
quality and quantity of the efforts made by technical staffs at our monkey
quarters, therefore, should be highly evaluated.
We can deduce many scientific and technical fruits from the data
accumulated by them.
My life owes its
happiness to the active and earnest staffs working with monkeys rather than to
the monkeys themselves, so I heartily think today.
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4 BREEDING TOPICS ON CERCOPITHECUS
AETHIOPS
Not many reports on captive breeding of Cercopithecus aethiops
have been made so far, and only a few were reported on those under indoor
individually caged conditions. I
would like to make a few remarks on the results we have obtained since we
imported 42 aethiops (34 females, 8 males) in 1979.
The breeding systems we adopted are:
A: one to one mating
system for 3 days for those whose menstrual cycles are evident.
B: one to one every other
day mating system for 14 weeks for those - whose menstrual cycles
are indefinite. This is
performed by placing breeders in 3 cages connected in line (a male in the middle
, and two females in both sides).
Each female is introduced
into a male cage one after the other every other day by releasing a shutter
between male and female cages.
For the system A 5 weeks after mating and for the system B 6, 10, 14th
week and 5 weeks after finishing mating, uterine palpation is performed for the
diagnosis of pregnancy. In both
systems, when pregnancy is confirmed, further mating is not performed.
The breeding results are as follows: System A showed a remarkable
increase in pregnancy rate by the year.
System B showed nearly
100 % conception rate from the starting year. We got 18 monkeys in '81 and 28 monkeys in '82.
In system B only 4 out of 22 female cases were mated for the full
duration of 14 weeks. Instead the
number of females adopted in system A increased, those in system B decreased
because once they had experienced parturition and weaning, their menstrual cycle
became regular.
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INFECTION RATE OF PSUEDOMONAS AERUGINOSA IN CYNOMOLGUS
MONKEYS AND THE ISOLATED SEROVAR
Psuedomonas aeruginosa is known to provoke serious symptoms
in human or other animals in relation to their general health conditions.
A very few cases are reported on natural infection of this bacterial
species in monkeys. However, little
is known concerning serovars with which monkeys are infected. We. tried to isolate P. aeruginosa from the diarrheal stools.
The results are shown in Table 1. Decrease
of incidence of infected monkeys with increase of feeding period at TPC suggests
that no spread .of the bacteria occurred in the artificial environment of TPC.
Table 2 shows the infection rate of P. aeruginosa with respect to stool
properties at the time of importation: of normal stools 9.7 %, of loose stools
20.8 % and of diarrheal stool 18.6 %. As
shown in Table 3, G & E serovars were highly isolated.
This trend is very similar to that in human cases.
The changes from G serovar to E serovar as the duration of captivity
increases suggest that there may be differences in residing ability in
monkey’s intestines or in resistivity to ill effects of intestinal
environments by the difference of serovar.
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6 THE BUILDING OF FOOD STORAGE
The food storage building is made of 3 rooms: a storage room, a kitchen
and a room for refrigeration machine. The
area of storage room is 100 m2, with 3 m height and 300 m3 capacity.
The temperature is kept around 5 ±1゜C.
The storage room can store 2 weeks food for 3,000 monkeys (apples,
citrus, bananas & biscuits commercially prepared for monkeys).
Every morning in the kitchen, 3 men with clean white work-clothes begin
their works with cutting fruits that were already washed the day before.
Using an automatic cutter, the fruit is cut into strips and then
measured. The computer calculates
the amounts of fruits and biscuits to be delivered.
In the afternoon they take out 400 kg fruits from cartons.
That is rather a heavy task. A
man deals with about 120 containers that have been sterilized.
Two other men wash fruits
for the next day using a semi-automatic fruit-washer specially devised for this
center, with the washing capacity of 500 kg an hour.
After washed, fruits -are put back to the storage room again.
At the end of morning and afternoon tasks, routines such as cleaning the
room, checking the trailer and taking the memo for the day are assigned.
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7 ON THE TECHNIQUES OF CARE FOR CYNOMOLGUS MONKEYS
-
A POSTPARTUM TREATMENT -
Monkey's parturition usually comes around at night times and nobody helps
it in general.
This means a postpartum
treatment is done several or more hours after the parturition.
In this note I would like to refer to the treatment of a case of
placental retention. Mother and
baby monkeys were caught by a net, and the mother was restrained.
As we have noticed ahead, the uterus was hard and judged as big as a fist
by palpation which means placenta is still retained.
After separating the baby we tried to pull the umbilical cord, rubbing
the uterus from external abdomen lightly. In
this case the cord luckily came out smoothly and the removed placenta was
duplicate. In some cases, retained
placentae fail to come out by the above-mentioned treatment or come out
spontaneously in 4 or 5 days. Otherwise
we perform laparotomy for difficult cases.
We have to check the condition of mammae, milk secretion and body weight
with mothers as well as the gender, skin conditions, the presence or absence of
external injury, malformation, body weight, etc., with babies.
As for placenta, it will be handed over to the researcher concerned if
any endocrinological, pathological, microbiological or immunological tests are
scheduled. We let the mother go
back into her cage after setting the baby in the middle of the cage.
Usually she holds her baby in no time and thus mother- infant
relationship is spontaneously generated. An
example of the record of postpartum treatment is presented below.
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A CASE REPORT: SPONTANEOUS DIABETES MELLITUS WITH XANTHOMA DIABETICORUM IN A
CYNOMOLGUS MONKEY
Among wild-originated cynomolgus monkeys imported from the Philippines I
found a male cynomolgus monkey with many dermal lesions.
His age was estimated about 5 or more years old.
The lesions were-re flat and as big as a grain of rice in size and
yellowish in color. Virological or
bacteriological tests were conducted and gave negative results for the lesions.
Gradually his health conditions got worse and he was sacrificed for
pathological examinations.
Histologic examinations
revealed that those dermal lesions had resulted from "diabetes".
In this case, serum biochemical test was found impossible because of the
strong turbidity of the sera. The
results of urinalyses are as follows: polyuria 1,300 m1/day, glycosuria +++,
ketone bodies +. Many flat and
yellowish nodules as big as beans or hempseeds were seen on face, back and
scrotum at autopsy. Blood oozing
out of the cut surface on various parenchymal organs was cocoa-colored with a
milky-whitish tinge. At the time of
sacrifice the content of blood glucose was above 250 mg/d1.
The residual urine in-the bladder was -M for glucose detection.
As shown in Fig. 1, eminent decrease of Langerhans islets and
degeneration, hyalinization or disappearance of Langerhans islets were noted in
pancreas. Fig.2 shows almost the
same findings as Fig. 1 except that the number of Langerhans islets is almost
normal. By the oil-red stain we
could see many -fatty droplets in the Sinusoid of Disse's spaces or in Kupffer
cells of the liver and also many droplets free or in hystiocytes in the skin.
From the observation of
this case, we reacknowledge the usefulness of monkeys as an animal model for the
research into human diabetes. Involvement of genetic factors should naturally be
considered. A specific breeding
system will be necessary for searching such metabolic disorder as spontaneous
diabetes in our colony.
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9 ON THE REPRODUCTIVE ENDOCRINOLOGY OF THE CYNOMOLGUS MONKEY
The cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) is expected as a model
of human reproductive endocrinology. However,
the methods for measuring the serum gonadotropins have not been established in
this species. The current
development of assay procedures for serum gonadotropins concentrations in this
species was described by a young investigator of TPC.
Immunoreactive follicule-stimulating hormone (FSH) was measured by using
the heterologous macaques FSH-radioimmunoassay (RIA) kit which was kindly
supplied by NIAND0, NIH. of U.S.A. Immunoreactive prolactin (PRL) was also
measured by using the human PRL-RIA kit obtained from Daiichi Radioisotope
Labs., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. Bioactive
luteinizing hormone (151) was determined by the radiareceptorassay (RRA) using
the rat testicular Leydig cells which was developed by our laboratory.
Serum concentrations of FSH, LH and PRL during the normal menstrual
cycles were determined by those assay systems.
In general, In the fluctuating patterns of circulating gonadotropins
levels during levels the normal menstrual cycle in this primate species
evidently resembled species those in humans.
Pregnant cynomolgus monkeys do secrete a significant amount of the
placental chrionic gonadotropin only for a very limited term, that is, for a few
days about 3 weeks after pregnancy. Little
amount of PRL was secreted during the first three quarters of pregnancy period.
At the later period of pregnancy, a significant increase of maternal
serum PRL was observed. In other
words, there are pronounced differences in the changes of LH and PRL activities
during pregnancy between cynomolgus monkeys and human.
Therefore, it is likely that the cynomolgus monkey is not similar to
human, with the endocrine mechanism of maintaining pregnancy.
The profiles of gonadotropin fluctuations during the normal menstrual
cycle as well as the normal pregnancy period in the cynomolgus monkey were
presented at the second TPC symposium and will be summarized in Jap. J. Med. Sci.
Biol. in the near future.
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THE INSTITUTE OF PRIMATE RESEARCH (IPR) , KENYA, AFRICA (DIRECTOR: DR. JAMES G.
ELSE)
An introduction of the above-mentioned institute is made,
being digested from its annual report of 1982. The institute is situated in Central East Africa.
It was founded to promote nonhuman primates research in Africa.
It has developed its own characteristics as to ecological and
behaviorological studies as well as biomedical researches into captive-bred
monkeys. Baboons, vervet, sykes, greater bushbaby, debrazza, gray
mangabey, yellow baboon, black & white colobus, black mangabey total 529 in
number, of which F1 are 124.
The themes of research on
reproductive biology, clinical medicine and case reports, infectious disease,
and behavior are introduced. The institute also offers scientific affiliations for
overseas researchers undertaking primate field studies, for example, Dr. J.
Yamagiwa, of Kyoto Univ., was there among 20 foreign researchers doing
ecological and behavioral studies.
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A CONTRIBUTION BY A VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW:
-
A behavioral study on cynomolgus monkeys-
Being strange to cynomolgus monkeys ,I started my behavioral
study of this species by reading a book written by "Napier" about
their characteristics in morphology and ecology.
They are smaller in body size than Japanese monkeys and have a tail-of
fairly longer length than the body. In
TPC, a lot of data have been accumulated on them mainly from the viewpoint of
husbandry and medical sciences. Species
of monkeys so far utilized in behavioral studies in foreign countries are mostly
rhesus and pig-tailed macaques, baboons, squirrel monkeys, and in my country are
Japanese monkeys almost exclusively. Kojima and Mt. Takasaki are known to the world as Japanese
monkeys' natural habitats. We could
observe their natural life by giving them food. This method of giving them food enabled us to integrate
ecological and behavioral studies by the observation of correlation- ships
between individual monkeys. But we
encountered another problem, that is, the monkeys also became very familiar and
at ease with people. In Japan the
cynomolgus monkey has been used so far mainly as a laboratory animal .
The cynomolgus monkey has lots of the same physiologic characters as
Japanese macaques whereas almost no special attention has been paid to them from
the standpoint of behavioral study. This
means that the behavioral study of cynomolgus monkey is very much expected.
Particularly I expect a new
field of behavioral study, if we
may call it, “behavior science of breeding” will grow in connection with the
development of laboratory animal sciences of this species.
In the first place I started my study gazing at monkeys kept in cages
without even taking any records. I
wanted to grasp the similarities and differences between the cynomolgus monkeys
and the Japanese monkey. The long
tail of the cyno gave me an odd impression, but soon I realized they were using
their skill fully. A male monkey
gathered with his tail some of the left-overs from the sink of the neighboring
cage. In the confined captive space their tails then seem to become
in the other monkey' s ways. It is
unclear to me at this time if the monkeys are touching tails because of
proximity or social behavioral relation. From
observations made so far, the differences between the two species I have noted
are: expressional patterns as lip smacking and the incidence of grooming.
In the near future I will carry out close observations on the differences
between wild-originated and domestically-bred monkeys.
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14 AN EXCELLENT MONKEY COMPOUND OF RESEARCH PRIMATES IN SELANGOR, MALAYSIA
Dr. A.C. Laursen, a manager, is an English veterinarian, started his
business of supplying captive-bred as well as wild-caught cynomolgus monkeys in
Malaysia in 1973 with his wife who is a biochemist.
Five technical assistants are working for his compound.
Total number of monkeys exported from his compound was 1 ,300 in 1981 and
about 200 monkeys per month are now continuously exported to England, U. S .A.,
Japan and many countries in Europe. About
180 monkeys a year are born -in his breeding colony by the group mating system.
His compound mainly , consists of his own ho-use and 5 animal houses (1
for exporting, 2 for breeding, 1 for parturition and nursing and 1 for rearing
juveniles) . The area of an animal
house was 72 m2 and there were 100 hanging type individual cages in
each house. The floors of those
cages were concrete which made them easy to clean.
At the time we visited the compound, about 700 monkeys were being kept,
of which about 260 females were for ' breeding and about 100 were for
exportation. Remaining young
monkeys were being nursed and reared for the future breeding.
Monkeys of Dr. Laursen are fed mainly with solid food and fruits (such as
papaya, banana, starfruits or guava) . The
young monkeys are also given rice with oil or peanuts .
Dr. Laursen conducts a daily check-up for monkeys, and if diarrhea,
respiratory disorders and injuries etc. were found, antibiotics or sulpha drugs
are administered. Also various
vitamins are given to those with little or no appetite.
Individual record is kept everyday.
In 1979, the Malaysian government declared a policy of restricting the
exportation of cynomolgus and pig-tailed macaques up to 5,000 in total a year.
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15 A CLINICAL COMMENTARY BY A CUB VETERINARIAN: Surgical treatment for rectal
prolapse
The means we take in this center to solve the monkeys' frustrations that
may be induced by the routine captive feeding environments is firstly to rear
together in a cage two juvenile .. monkeys of the same age (3 or 4 months old)
who have been weaned- from mothers. After
the 4 month period of paired caging 2 or 3 . groups of those pairs are put
together in a cage for at least 1 year. Rectal
prolapse is often found in a period of this group feeding.
The first time I entered the animal quarters, I saw several monkeys with
bandages on their hips. One of the
staff told me those were a curative tools for rectal prolapse.
Since then, I have experienced a lot of monkeys with this sickness and it
was evident that socially inferior monkeys were often suffering from it.
The anal sphincter of juvenile monkeys generally has not yet fully
developed and it is considered that with the continual tension and oppression
given by stronger monkeys their abdominal pressure or intestinal peristaltic
movement may exceed normal levels and as a result their intestines prolapse.
The length of prolapse is from several millimeters to 5 or more cm.
The use of bandages for such cases seemed to be a symptomatic treatment.
One day there was a case beyond medical aid, that was, the prolapsed
rectum had been degenerated showing bloody black color.
I tried to put it back with difficulties, feeling some kind of anxieties.
A few days later this monkey died of diffused necrosis of the rectum.
Soon after this experience I found another monkey of the same symptom.
At that time I decided to conduct a surgical operation.
Reading a textbook of clinical surgery in dogs, I happily could finish
the operation with success.
Today we usually conduct surgical operations for the cases of degenerated
rectal prolapse. And for the cases
of mild prolapse, tabacco-bag suture is taken to avoid the relapse.
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16 SKETCHING FROM A SPOT OF ANIMAL QUARTERS:
1)
One day a male cynomolgus monkey was lying on the cage floor with his
eyes moving vacantly to and for. I
thought something might have happened and was going to open the door.
Suddenly, he rose up and with his teeth showing threatened me. I was startled to death, yet the monkey looked delighted as
if to say, "I've done it!" From
the following day he seemed to wait for me - lying. He might have liked my startled face.
I thought, "I won't
be cheated!" But he looked sad
and disappointed unless I was startled. So,
once in a while I pretend as if I were worrying about him, then he looked so
happy. I said to him, "Let's
quit this game!' Then he answered,
"Why! I want to play it more!'
Now I know that even monkeys have his own characters and will.
2)
For us, technical staffs,
taking care of our own health is also a very important thing.
My families are also taking care of their health.
My tasks at, the center are :
In
the morning; observations (activity, appetite, conditions of feces, menstrual
bleeding, etc.), weight measuring, mating procedures and assistance of medical
treatments and in the afternoon; other tasks concerned with breeding.
Recently I assist the measurement of the volumes of urine and drinking
water and the determination of specific gravity of urine in hyperlipemic or
diabetic monkeys.
Eight months have passed since I came to this center.
The present tasks which the former trainees haven't done are very
interesting to me. I feel I have
already been well trained for .s catching monkeys.
Operating a transceiver to send the monkey observation data into the
computer is also something interesting. I
am expecting to learn more about our works.
Page-16
Five big news from the quarters in 1982.
1.
May - twin babies of the cynomolgus monkey were born for the first time.
Both are females: 236 and 280 g weight A--B--0 blood type: A & AB
Fraternal twins
(dizygotic twins)
2.
April - A Fl-female became pregnant at the age of 3 years 8 months and
her F:y-baby was born in April. Her
maternal behaviors are normal. ., The F:2 was weaned in August.
3.
August/September - The first consignment of F1 cynomolgus monkeys born at
TPC.
4.
June - The data processing on routine cares and breeding was totally
computerized.
5.
March - The number of monkeys kept at TPC exceeded two thousand.
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17 A GUIDE TO RECENT FOREIGN LITERATURES
Abstracts of foreign scientific papers for Japanese readers who are
interested in laboratory primates.