4.2 Article

From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants

期刊

ZOO BIOLOGY
卷 42, 期 1, 页码 17-25

出版社

WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/zoo.21693

关键词

elephant; laterality; side change; sleep; welfare

向作者/读者索取更多资源

Despite increased research, many characteristics of resting behavior in elephants remain unknown. This study observed nighttime lying behavior in 10 zoo elephants and found that elephants on soft substrates had longer lying bouts and increased total lying durations per night. The frequency of side changes between lying bouts was also higher on soft substrates, indicating equal laterality in resting behavior. The study suggests monitoring these characteristics in elephants to improve their well-being.
Despite increased research during the past years, many characteristics of resting behavior in elephants are still unknown. For example, there is only limited data suggesting elephants express longer lying bouts and increased total nightly lying durations on soft substrates as compared to hard surfaces. Additionally, it has not been investigated how frequently elephants change body sides between lying bouts. Here we present these characteristics based on observations of nighttime lying behavior in 10 zoo elephants (5 African Loxodonta africana and 5 Asian Elephas maximus elephants) living in five different European facilities. We found that elephants housed on soft substrates have significantly increased total lying durations per night and longer average lying bouts. Furthermore, at 70%-85% of all bouts, a consistently higher frequency of side change between lying bouts occurred on soft substrates, leading to an overall equal laterality in resting behavior. Deviations from this pattern became evident in elephants living on nonsand flooring or/and in nondominant individuals of nonfamily groups, respectively. Based on our findings, we consider elephants to normally have several lying bouts per night with frequent side changes, given an appropriate substrate and healthy social environment. We encourage elephant-keeping facilities to monitor these characteristics in their elephants' nighttime behavior to determine opportunities for further improvements and detect alterations putatively indicating social or health problems in individual elephants at an early stage.

作者

我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。

评论

主要评分

4.2
评分不足

次要评分

新颖性
-
重要性
-
科学严谨性
-
评价这篇论文

推荐

暂无数据
暂无数据