The shipping of semen doses to sow farms can impair boar semen quality. Unfortunately, there is currently no practice-oriented information available regarding general shipping conditions of boar semen. For this reason, a special mobile sensing app (TransportLog 1.0), utilizing the built-in sensors of smartphones, has been programmed to capture vibration emissions during shipping of semen doses (QuickTip Flexitubes®, Minitüb). Data were analyzed, transformed and used as standards for simulating vibration emissions from an orbital shaker IKA MTS 4 (Laborgeräte München) in a spermatological reference laboratory. Twenty ejaculates were collected randomly and diluted using a one-step isothermal process in a split-sample procedure in Beltsville Thawing Solution (BTS, Minitüb). The sperm concentration was adjusted to 24 × 106 sperm/mL. The dose filling volume was 85 ± 1 mL. Samples were stored for seven days at 17 °C. The results showed that circular horizontal vibration emissions with frequencies of 300 rpm for a duration of 6 h led to a significant alkalization of the BTS-extended semen. Semen motility, mitochondrial activity, acrosome and plasma membrane integrity as well as thermo-resistance all demonstrated a frequency-dependent negative response to vibration emissions during long-term storage. This study leads to new insights and recommendations for the shipping of boar semen in the artificial insemination industry. Furthermore, a new monitoring tool for boar semen shipping was established using mobile sensing.
Keywords: Artificial insemination; Boar semen; Mobile app; Semen quality; Shipping.
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