I cannot provide a direct answer to your question, as the search results do not contain specific information about how body condition score adjustments can improve heat stress recovery in animals. However, the search results do contain information about feeding behavior in animals and how it relates to other functions.
How Feeding Behavior Affects Other Functions
In principle, animals must maintain a feeding pace equal to their metabolism throughout life, though intake doesn’t always closely follow expenditure. Animals can rely on body reserves when intake lags. Some animals build large reserves to prepare for increased metabolic demands or expected food shortages. For example, hibernating mammals store large amounts of tissue fat before dormancy, and migrating birds do the same before departure.
Discrepancies between intake and expenditure distort the basic pattern of caloric regulation for the benefit of other functions.
Factors Causing Discrepancies in Feeding
- Diurnal periodicity Feeding has a diurnal periodicity, meaning the active period may fall in daylight or during the night, depending on the species. Filter feeders are often continuously active.
- Priority claims of other functions Thirsty mammals or birds eat less because food intake would aggravate water shortage. The same is true of mammals in a hot environment, since food intake increases heat production, intensifying heat stress, and of female mammals during estrus. In all these cases, more or less marked loss of body weight results.
- Social facilitation Individuals often start feeding when they observe other members of the same (or other) species doing so. Both timing of feeding and choice of food are affected in this way. Unfamiliar food is accepted more readily by individuals observing others eating it. Such phenomena have been noted in mammals, birds, and fish.
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