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and behaviorally focused hypotheses. Properly managing the health and welfare of animals in behavioral
or cognitive research is something that should be a goal of any group running behavioral or cognitive
experiments.
However, the effort involved in documenting details of animal care can be time consuming (Green
et al., 2017; Haywood & Greene, 2008). Technological solutions can help reduce the burden of
documenting animal care activities. For example, a technology-based animal care tracking system can aid
in facilitating the documentation of animal care activities but can additionally serve to reduce the time
required to document care compliance as well as being a method for validating that care has been received
for each animal on the correct schedule. Quick response (QR) codes are widely used in many fields in
biology. QR codes can encode URLs as quick links to open websites, can link to online data entry forms,
or can contain simple text. Pairing QR codes with smartphone/smart device technology has become a
popular method to document animal care (e.g., Green et al., 2017), track specimens (e.g., Diazgranados &
Funk, 2013), or facilitate data entry (e.g., Oteyo & Toili, 2020).
Although using technology to document animal care more easily can save time spent reporting
basic care, the quality and consistency of care also need to be monitored and tracked. Technological
solutions can also help track and verify that care has been provided to each animal on the proper schedule.
Verification would help double-check that no animals have been accidentally overlooked and that care
(especially tasks that do not occur on a daily basis) are following the intended schedule. A verification
system like this would help improve the consistency of care while reducing animal care staff stress about
potentially missing critical care. This method would be especially useful when many animals are being
cared for across multiple cages, tanks, or enclosures and multiple categories of care are completed for each
animal on different time scales (for example when some care needs to be completed every day, but other
care needs to be completed once a week).
I developed a new system to document and verify animal care activities. My group recently started
working with a new system in the laboratory and now have about 45 adult Northern bobwhite quail (Colinus
virginianus) housed in about 20 cages, approved for use in behavioral and cognition experiments by the
University of Cincinnati IACUC (protocol 21-02-23-01). The population is cared for by several laboratory
members and has tasks that need to be completed on different time intervals. For example, on a daily
schedule, lab members change each cage’s food and water and check the health of all the birds, on a weekly
schedule we clean the cage trays, and at least once every two weeks we provide enrichment. The need for
a method track all of these activities, verify that everything has been completed according to the schedule,
and to manage care across multiple people were the drivers behind the design of our system.
My system is a low-cost, flexible, and easy to use method that facilitates documentation of our
animal husbandry activities, enables real-time and remote-enabled verification that critical daily tasks have
been completed for every cage, and helps us monitor our longer-term tasks to make sure that our care team
is adhering to our set schedule.
Here, I summarize the system, which we have been using and validating in the laboratory since
summer 2021. The main materials and components needed to implement this system are QR codes, a
thermal laminator, a QR scanner, a computer to manage data input, and a database into which the data are
scanned and summarized. QR tags are generated for each activity that we want to track for each cage and
then two Google Sheet workbooks are used to input and summarize the data. The system requires access to
the internet (to access Google Sheets) but does not require wireless internet access to use. A formatted and
publicly accessible example of both spreadsheets, containing all scripts used to automatically add the date
and time, filter, collate, summarize, and conditionally format the data, and the summary table is available
at https://bit.ly/3yycw1b. This file can be copied as a template and then modified for each laboratory’s
individual requirements as necessary.
System Overview
There are six main steps to setting up the system, which are described below: (1) purchase a QR
scanner, (2) generate and print QR codes, (3) set up the central hub for data input, (4) input data from QR