A new apparatus for studying feeding and drinking in the mouse.

The quantity of powder food consumed by individual mice was gauged with a newly developed apparatus that includes a specialized feeding station, an electric scale, and an interface to a computer that records the weight of the powder food jar. Using the measurements that exceeded the cutoff value, that is, the threshold between a mouse feeding or drinking event and scale noise, the reconstructed data were presented as the daily pattern of feeding and drinking in time resolution of 9 to 30 min. In this system, the ratio of noise to total consumption value was less than 4%. The fractal structure and fitting curve of this time series data were also analyzed by the nonlinear least-squares method, combined with the maximum entropy method. These analyses demonstrated that the mouse feeding event has circadian and ultradian periodicity. This apparatus and system are useful tools in studying the daily feeding pattern of mice.