Table 1.
Nutritional composition of loose-hay and pelleted-hay alfalfa diets, as well as in situ rumen digestibility.
Fig 1.
Particle size distribution of in diet treatment biomass, and percentage of residual feed particles in feces in wethers on a loose-hay (Hay) and pelleted (Pellet) alfalfa diet.
Intake was averaged across 3-day blocks over a 14-day period.
Table 2.
Weight, intake, and efficiency values for wethers on loose-hay diet and pelleted-hay alfalfa diets.
Table 3.
Blood serum parameters for wethers fed either a loose alfalfa hay or pelleted alfalfa diet.
Fig 2.
Observed bacterial richness (A) and Shannon diversity (B) in the rumen of wethers on loose-hay or pelleted-hay alfalfa diets. Significance was determined at p < 0.05, by linear mixed model for observed SVs and Conover test for Shannon diversity, with sheep ID as a fixed effect.
Fig 3.
Distance-based redundancy analysis of Bray-Curtis Distance between rumen bacterial communities in wethers receiving loose-hay or pelleted-hay alfalfa diets.
Fig 4.
Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) plot of unweighted Jaccard distance between rumen bacterial communities in wethers receiving loose-hay or pelleted-hay alfalfa diets.
Ellipses represent treatment weeks. Lowest stress = 0.0649, R2 = 0.9958.
Fig 5.
Discriminatory rumen bacterial sequence variance by treatment group for wethers receiving loose-hay or pelleted-hay alfalfa diet treatments.
Significance (p < 0.05) determined by binomial test.
Fig 6.
Correlations between the 50 most abundant rumen bacteria and lamb growth, serum parameters, and treatments.
Only significant (P < 0.05) Spearman’s correlations are reported.
Table 4.
Serum factors significantly correlated (Spearman’s) with weight in lambs.