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ABSTRACT
Crowding refers to a situation where there is an excessive number of individual in a given space or environment. White blood cell (WBC) or leukocytes are cells of the immune system that are involved in protecting the body against infectious diseases and foreign invaders it is classified into granulocytes and agranulocutes the granulocytes are neutrophils, basophills, eosinophils. While the agranulocutes are lymphocytes and monocytes. In this study,the effects of crowding(space limitation) on total white blood cells count and differential in wistar rats was investigated. The study was carried out in the animal House of the Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacology, University of Benin. Twenty-five male wistar rats we're used of comparable ages (n=5), weighing 160- 190g the rats were left to acclamatize for two weeks before placed in plastic cages with wire mesh floor of various sizes labelled A-E. Group A served as control group with dimension of 42cm x 30cm x 24cm, group B was same size of control, group C 3/4 the space of control, group D 1/2 the space of the control, group E 1/4 the space of the control, and they were exposed for a period of seven weeks. At the end of the experiment, the rats were sacrificed under chloroform anaesthesia, Statistical analysis was carried out using graph pad prism version 8.0.1 and thereafter, blood samples were collected for haematological analysis. Results were presented as mean + SEM while analysis of variance was used to compare the means of test and control values. P values of less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results revealed significant decrease in total white blood cell count, and increase in neutrophil count, eosinophils count, while lymphocyte, monocyte and basophil count were not significant. It was therefore concluded that crowding has effects on total white blood cell count, neutrophils and eosinophils in cages that are more reduced in dimension.
