A REVIEW OF ANATOMICAL AND HISTOLOGICAL FEATURE OF THE ADRENAL GLAND IN DIFFERENT SPECIES OF BIRDS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61841/12fvfx21Keywords:
Adrenal gland, Morphology, Histology, Anatomy, Birds.Abstract
The adrenal glands have an important impact on many physiological behaviours in vertebrate animals such as birds, due to the roles that hormones produced by adrenal glands play in influencing growth and differentiation of tissues, regulating metabolism, resisting infection, toxicity, and stress, and tolerating cold. Therefore, examining the morphological features associated with avian adrenal glands has numerous implications for poultry production, veterinary medicine, and ornithology.
The purpose of this article is to review and summaries the scientific literature regarding the importance of adrenal glands in avian species while also highlighting recently completed studies related to avian adrenal gland morphology, and demonstrating how these studies have examined changes that take place within avian adrenal glands because of interspecific variation and biological diversity.
Anatomically, birds have two adrenal glands located at the cranial end of each kidney. The adrenal gland is usually oval, triangular or pyramidal in shape and varies in color from yellow to brown depending on how much carotenoids the adrenal gland contains.
Microscopically, the avian adrenal gland has very specific morphological characteristics. The adrenal gland has a connective tissue capsule surrounding it made up of collagenous and elastic fibers and contains ganglia of the autonomic nervous system. The parenchyma of the adrenal gland is made up of both cortical and medullary tissues that are intermixed. There are significant individual differences in morphometric characteristics such as thickness of capsule, size of nuclei of cortical and medullary cells and relative area of cortical tissue compared to medullary tissue.
In addition, several studies report that the adrenal gland's morphology and physiology are affected by environmental factors which include the level of functional activity and seasonal variation in adrenal hormone secretion.
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