The effects of olfactory stimulation on the behavior of captive ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta)
| Autor: | V. Tamara Montrose, Brittanny Baker, Sienna Taylor |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Zoology Lemur Motor Activity Animal Welfare Lemur catta Predation biology.animal Animal welfare Animals 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences 050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology Animal Husbandry Environmental enrichment Behavior Animal biology 05 social sciences 0402 animal and dairy science Ring tailed lemurs 04 agricultural and veterinary sciences General Medicine biology.organism_classification 040201 dairy & animal science Smell Odor Odorants Olfactory stimulation Animals Zoo Female Animal Science and Zoology |
| Zdroj: | Zoo Biology. 37:16-22 |
| ISSN: | 0733-3188 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/zoo.21392 |
| Popis: | Ring-tailed lemurs reside in many animal collections worldwide. Lemur welfare may be a cause of concern due to some captive individuals exhibiting stereotypic behavior. Despite these concerns, there has been little exploration of methods of environmental enrichment for ring-tailed lemurs. Olfactory stimulation can enhance captive animal welfare by encouraging species-typical behaviors, enhancing behavioral diversity, and decreasing stereotypic behaviors. We aimed to investigate the effects of olfactory stimulation via lavender, peppermint, coconut, and prey odor upon the behavior of eight captive ring-tailed lemurs. We exposed the lemurs to six individual odor conditions (odor control, novel object control, lavender, peppermint, coconut, and Morio worms) and observed them for 4 hr a day for 3 days with an intervening period of 4 days between conditions. We recorded the lemurs' behavior under each condition using instantaneous scan sampling. We found significant effects of olfactory stimulation on the ring-tailed lemurs' behavior in the initial analysis but these did not survive correction for multiple testing. Overall, while our findings are suggestive of a general effect of olfactory stimulation on the captive ring-tailed lemurs they did not indicate a marked influence of olfactory condition. However, further investigation with a larger sample size and more biologically relevant odors may be beneficial to fully examine potential effects of olfactory stimulation in captive lemurs. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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