What’s For Dinner, Mickey?: The Significance of Wildlife Foraging in Rewilded Mice on Growth, Immune Activity, and Diet Composition

Abstract

Natural exposure to high levels of environmental microbes lead to highly activated and antigen-experienced microbiota and immune systems. Any organisms living in the wild are continuously exposed to different pathogens and various potentially dangerous bacteria. Nutrition and diet is certainly one of the key choices an organism will make that can impact immune function through shaping the microbial community of the gut microbiome. Decision analysis against various tradeoffs when choosing diet consumption is and extremely complex behaviour. In this paper, I investigate the relationship between foraging of wild plants, behavioural impacts on diet diversity, which is correlated with gut microbiota, and immune response. It is important to understand precisely how diet affects the complex relationship between an organism and its bacterial partners. I found that foraging of wild plants in mice had little correlation with weight gain, nor with Neutrophil-Lymphocyte ratios, a measure of immune system activation. However, foraging on wild plants inversely impacts feeding on the provided mouse chow. Mice continue to obtain resource-rich foods from wild plant when they are not getting those nutrients from the chow. This implies that mice can implement self-regulation of diet.