A View of Dairy Calf Absorption

When a dairy calf is born, they have an immune system that is too new to protect itself. Therefore, they must drink the first milk that their mother produces, called colostrum, to obtain essential antibodies that will help them fight off disease. If a calf does not absorb the antibodies in colostrum they are much more likely to get sick and die, and if they do survive they will produce less milk overall during their lifetime. Despite the importance, fairly little is known about the absorption process that those antibodies go through. In this image, the dark pink bubbles are antibodies inside the intestinal cells of the newborn calf. This represents one of the first images of this absorptive process in the dairy calf.