Maybe it seems like an everyday sort of activity to everyone on my friends list but you.
However:
I used to have a job in a research lab at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. It was a study of the effects of infant nutrition on visual and cognitive development - I am partially responsible for the fact that you can now buy infant formula supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids. We used infant rhesus monkeys, and fed them one of three different diets: safflower oil-based (deficient in omega-3s, and equivalent to infant formula sold in 3rd world countries), soy oil-based (standard infant formula in the U.S.), and simulated monkey milk (with omega-3s). The diets were color-coded: green for saff, red for soy, yellow for SMM. So was everything else: the formula itself (food coloring), the monkeys' cage tags, the tape we used to label samples, etc.
We paired our monkeys during the day so they could have social interaction, and separated them for feedings. The research assistants could tell the monkeys apart by their appearance, but the animal care staff relied on their ID tattoos. Occasionally they made a mistake, and the animals were separated for meals into the wrong cages. If that meant they got the wrong formula, they had their tiny little stomachs pumped. It was bad.
So we experimented with Manic Panic, a non-irritating, vegetable-based, omega-3-fatty-acid-free hair dye, to see if it would help avoid errors in separating animals. We picked a pair of monkeys named Simon and Garfunkel and dyed green (for Simon, who was on the safflower oil diet) and red (for Garfunkel, on the soy diet) stripes into their fur. Simon handled it all right, although he didn't like the part where we held him under the faucet to rinse off the dye. Garfunkel, on the other hand... well, what I wound up writing in the lab notebook afterwards was, "Bright red Manic Panic looks exactly like blood. Consider using another color, such as hot pink, to avoid terrifying the animals."
In the end, we decided that it would be less work to separate the monkeys for the noontime feeding ourselves. So we only ever dyed them once.
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Date: 2005-02-24 11:27 pm (UTC)However:
I used to have a job in a research lab at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. It was a study of the effects of infant nutrition on visual and cognitive development - I am partially responsible for the fact that you can now buy infant formula supplemented with omega-3 fatty acids. We used infant rhesus monkeys, and fed them one of three different diets: safflower oil-based (deficient in omega-3s, and equivalent to infant formula sold in 3rd world countries), soy oil-based (standard infant formula in the U.S.), and simulated monkey milk (with omega-3s). The diets were color-coded: green for saff, red for soy, yellow for SMM. So was everything else: the formula itself (food coloring), the monkeys' cage tags, the tape we used to label samples, etc.
We paired our monkeys during the day so they could have social interaction, and separated them for feedings. The research assistants could tell the monkeys apart by their appearance, but the animal care staff relied on their ID tattoos. Occasionally they made a mistake, and the animals were separated for meals into the wrong cages. If that meant they got the wrong formula, they had their tiny little stomachs pumped. It was bad.
So we experimented with Manic Panic, a non-irritating, vegetable-based, omega-3-fatty-acid-free hair dye, to see if it would help avoid errors in separating animals. We picked a pair of monkeys named Simon and Garfunkel and dyed green (for Simon, who was on the safflower oil diet) and red (for Garfunkel, on the soy diet) stripes into their fur. Simon handled it all right, although he didn't like the part where we held him under the faucet to rinse off the dye. Garfunkel, on the other hand... well, what I wound up writing in the lab notebook afterwards was, "Bright red Manic Panic looks exactly like blood. Consider using another color, such as hot pink, to avoid terrifying the animals."
In the end, we decided that it would be less work to separate the monkeys for the noontime feeding ourselves. So we only ever dyed them once.