Understanding impacts of zoo visitors: Quantifying behavioural changes of two popular zoo species during COVID-19 closures
Visitors are normally a prominent and constant feature in a zoo animals’ environment with more than 700 million people visiting zoos and aquariums worldwide, annually. Animal-visitor interactions can be enriching and stimulating and are now considered within the Five Domains of animal welfare assessment. Zoo closures as a result of COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity […]
The effect of different types of environmental enrichment on Humboldt penguin Spheniscus humboldti behaviour
Penguins exhibited at zoological institutions can be prone to a foot condition known as pododermatitis (or bumblefoot) if they have high levels of sedentary behaviour. Providing penguins with environmental enrichment can increase activity levels by offering opportunities to engage in species-appropriate behaviour such as swimming and locomoting around the exhibit. The goal of the current […]
Understanding impacts of zoo visitors: Quantifying behavioural changes of two popular zoo species during COVID-19 closures
Visitors are normally a prominent and constant feature in a zoo animals’ environment with more than 700 million people visiting zoos and aquariums worldwide, annually. Animal-visitor interactions can be enriching and stimulating and are now considered within the Five Domains of animal welfare assessment. Zoo closures as a result of COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity […]
Understanding impacts of zoo visitors: Quantifying behavioural changes of two popular zoo species during COVID-19 closures
Visitors are normally a prominent and constant feature in a zoo animals’ environment with more than 700 million people visiting zoos and aquariums worldwide, annually. Animal-visitor interactions can be enriching and stimulating and are now considered within the Five Domains of animal welfare assessment. Zoo closures as a result of COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity […]
Training penguins to interact with enrichment devices for lasting effects
The modern zoo has brought about two major advances in the behavioral welfare of their exhibited animals: (a) The use of environmental enrichment to promote naturalistic behaviors and (b) the use of training to improve voluntary husbandry care. Whereas training itself has been talked about as an effective enrichment strategy, little has been done to […]
Behavioral and hormonal responses of Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) to tourism and nest site visitation
One of the results of human disturbance at seabird colonies may be the provocation of the typical vertebrate adrenocortical response to stressors, but there have been few studies that demonstrate this. The present study demonstrates that simple human presence at the nest site, without effects of capture or handling, is physiologically stressful for breeding Magellanic […]
State-dependent decisions in long-term fasting king penguins, Aptenodytes patagonicus, during courtship and incubation
Using an automatic identification and weighing system, we investigated changes in adult body mass in relation to reproductive behaviour during courtship and incubation in free-living king penguins. Despite stressful nutritional conditions and variability of fast length, the majority of pairs incubated successfully by accumulating large body reserves before fasting, which provided flexibility in fasting strategies. […]
Long-term fasting and re-feeding in penguins
Spontaneous fasting during reproduction (sometimes with a full stomach) and moult is a major characteristic of the annual cycle of penguins. Long-term fasting (up to four months in male emperor penguins) is anticipated by the accumulation of fat (incubation fast) and of fat and protein (moult fast). During most of the incubation fast, birds rely […]
Behavioral and Physiological Significance of Minimum Resting Metabolic Rate in King Penguins
Because fasting king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) need to conserve energy, it is possible that they exhibit particularly low metabolic rates during periods of rest. We investigated the behavioral and physiological aspects of periods of minimum metabolic rate in king penguins under different circumstances. Heart rate (f(H)) measurements were recorded to estimate rate of oxygen consumption […]
Rush and grab strategies in foraging marine endotherms: the case for haste in penguins
The speed at which air-breathing marine predators that forage by diving should swim is likely to depend on a variety of factors that differ substantially from those relevant in animals for hich access to oxygen is unlimited. We used loggers attached to free-living penguins to examine the speed at which three species swam during periods […]