Table 1.

General description of the four major methods for quantifying feeding behavior, their accuracy, sources of errors, and home cage compatibility.

	Temporal precision	Caloric Quantification	Accuracy	Sources of errors	Cage type compatibility
Manual Weighing	∼daily	Yes	∼100 mg	Spillage, animal feces and urine	Home cage compatible
Automated Weighing System	∼seconds	Yes	∼1mg	Load cell drifts, spillage	Requires specialized caging
Pellet Dispensers	∼seconds	Yes	20 - 300 mg depending on pellet size	Hording pellets, crumbs, dispenser jamming	Home cage compatible
Video Recording	∼sub-second	No	No quantification of amount of intake	Behavioral mis-classification, no measure of actual intake	Requires Specialized caging