Environmental factors and effects on breeding performances and housing in small laboratory rodents: A technical report

Abstract

Based on their professional experience in large scale production of laboratory rodents, the authors report on some documented cases showing the effects of environmental factors on reproductive performances of the rodent strains they produce. Beyond continuation of the effect of a Simple environmental factor (temperature, light) the reported cases show that environmental effects must not be systematically generalized to several strains or, even less, to several species.
Moreover, the incidence of associated (complex) factors, which cannot be evaluated without the opportunity of having a control sample must be emphasized. This last point is of major importance when comparing results coming from different laboratories although the maintain environmental factors are a priori identical.