About this Research Topic
The great variety of challenges an individual may encounter can stimulate and activate, for example, well-known physiological axes such as: the gut microbiome-brain axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the sympathetic-adrenergic, and the peritoneum-vagal-cholinergic axes. Under certain circumstances, only some physiological components may be involved, i.e. hormones or molecular mediators, without necessarily using the whole scaffold of the mentioned axes. Thus, both spatial and temporal scale-dependency lie at the heart of biological responses. In this sense, the physiological machinery involved in coping is directly related to another key concept in welfare: resilience. This implies that an individual can recover the basal state after coping with a stressful challenge. The most worrying scenarios are those in which birds, regardless of their level of resilience, encounter challenges on a sustained basis. The chronic activation of the mentioned machinery demands increasing resources in the physiological context of chronic stress. Homeostasis recovery gets harder as demands increase, and a broad spectrum of welfare and health-related impairments could occur.
If welfare is understood as providing birds (animals) with a life worth living, this concept could apply to individuals from a variety of avian species of which we humans make different uses (commercial, scientific, productive, touristic, etc.). In this sense, this Topic is not centered only on poultry species. Contributions linking physiology and welfare in avian species outside the "poultry arena" are also more than welcome. Moreover, studies exploring a wide variety of challenging scenarios, i.e., alterations in the diets, changes in the social groups and on birds’ physical environment, etc, will be considered. A variation of contribution types will be received: review, mini-review, opinion, original research, brief research report, hypothesis and theory, conceptual analysis, and perspective.
Topic Editor Nico Nazar is a consultant on Animal Physiology and Welfare. The other Topic Editors declare no competing interests with regard to the Research Topic subject.
Keywords: behavior, environment, poultry, tourism, mascotism, avian, stress, challenge, wellbeing, homeostasis, stressor
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.