Arduino allows development of a low-cost, high-resolution metabolic and behavioral phenotyping system for birds

Abstract

Technological advancements now enable the use of flow-through respirometry for rapid, high-throughput metabolic phenotyping, but live-in systems currently do not exist for birds. We designed live-in respirometry chambers for small birds with the open-source electronics platform Arduino to continuously monitor bird body weight, food intake and water intake in sync with metabolic data collection. To demonstrate how this system can be implemented, we kept birds in the metabolic phenotypic chambers for 10 days while we progressively lowered the temperature from 25°C to 5°C. We used the data to calculate hourly energy expenditure and food/water intake during acute cold acclimation. We provide all plans and code for the live-in chambers, Arduino biomonitoring system and additional radio-frequency identification (RFID) module as a low-cost, DIY alternative to commercially available systems and to enable the use of standard respirometry equipment for metabolic phenotyping in birds.