Hump Attachment Structure of the Two-Humped Camel(Camelus bactrianus).

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The hump attachment structure was morphologically examined in the two-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus). The cranial hump is fixed by the trapezius and rhomboid muscles in the thoracic region. The strong collagen sheet in the basement of the hump is attached to the segmented bellies of the trapezius muscle, and the thoracic rhomboid muscle and the nuchal-supraspinous ligament support the attachment function of the trapezius muscle. The basement sheet possesses the line structure of collagen fibers, which are fitted to the segmented bundles of the trapezius muscle, and we observed that the muscle cells of the trapezius muscle are intermingled with the collagen fibers around the attachment line structure. In contrast, the caudal hump is directly attached to the subcutaneous tissue in the superficial region of the lumbar longissimus and lumbar iliocostal muscles. These findings demonstrated that the caudal hump of the twohumped camel is consistent with the hump of the one-humped camel in the attachment structure. -KEY WORDS: hump, rhomboid muscle, trapezius muscle, two-humped camel.The hump structure of the camels has been examined in the dromedary [3,5]. It has been demonstrated that the characteristic hump is attached to the subcutaneous adipose tissue on the latissimus dorsi muscle and fixed on the dorsal part of the lumbar region. While, in the two-humped camel, the cranial hump is expected to be different from the caudal in its attachment structure, since the cranial hump is located on the thoracic region and near the nuchal-supraspinous ligament. So, we dissected the dorsal region of the trunk in the two-humped camel and morphologically examined the attachment mechanism of both cranial and caudal humps. MATERIALS AND METHODSWe obtained one male two-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus) from a livestock farm in Huhehot district in the Inner Mongolia of China. The animal was exsanguinated from the common carotid artery, and was euthanized. We separated the head and four limbs from the trunk, and set the trunk in horizontal plane, and removed the skin. The animal was dissected in the dorsal superficial area of the trunk, and the hump attachment structure was observed by naked eyes.The three skeletal specimens of the two-humped camel were examined in the vertebrae related to the attachment of humps. The skeletons have been stored in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, Inner Mongolian Agricultural University, however, any biological data have not been recorded in the skeletons.The tissues were excised from the basement sheet of the cranial hump. The tissue blocks were fixed in 10% phosphate-buffered formalin. After 10 days of fixation, the tissues were dehydrated in ethanol, treated by xylene and embedded in paraffin. The blocks were sectioned at 4 µm, stained by haematoxylin and eosin, and observed with the light microscope. RESULTSThe cranial and caudal hump bodies consist of the white adipose and connective tissue, and show the sharp triangle in lateral aspect (Fig. 1). The former is located in the dors...

Morphometric studies on adult double humped camel of Ladakh, India

“…Elsewhere, the hump stand erects during summer and was deviated to a side in winter. The shape of the humps of Mongolian Bactrian were small and Pyramid Shaped (Endo et al, 2000) while those of Ladakh Bactrian were distinctly large and irregular. However, the measurement of the hump is a quite debatable parameter to distinguish the phenotypes because the hump is the main fat storage form in camel representing on average 85% of the adipose tissue (Faye et al, 2001a) and its volume is linked to the body condition score which is not under genetic dependence, but linked to the feeding status of the animals (Kamili et al, 2006).…”

“…Regarding the height up to wither, Endo et al (2000) reported that the Mongolian Bactrian was higher at the level of hump (7 feet i.e 213.26 cm) than Ladakh Bactrian.…”