3.1. Month of the cull
During the month of October, male adult deer in Phoenix Park are in their rutting period and therefore have minimal dietary intake. The first set of experiments therefore compared rumen tissue from animals culled just after this period (i.e. November) or three months later (i.e. January).
A comparison of the rumen papillae measurements from adult males culled in November and January is shown in detail in Table 1 . These data showed that whilst there were no significant differences in either papillae width or papillae density, there was a significant increase in papillae length in the male adults culled in January. In addition, it was determined that there was no significant difference in ages of the two groups – with November animals aged at 5.8 ± 0.7 years versus January animals aged at 7.0 ± 1.2 years (p = 0.3808, N = 5-12, Unpaired T-test).
Next, protein samples were obtained from 4 animals from each group and investigated using western blotting – see Figure 1 . The expected strong 43 kDa MCT1 signal was obtained in all samples. Analysis of these signals revealed that there was no significant difference between November (43 ± 5) and January (39 ± 3) (p = 0.4908, N=4, Unpaired T-Test). Similarly, the expected 50 kDa UT-B2 signal was also not significantly different between the two groups – with values of 22 ± 3 and 34 ± 9 (p = 0.2416, N=4, Unpaired T-Test) for November and January respectively.