Effect of Dietary Inclusion of Live Microbial Cultures on Faecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites in Safari Asian Elephants

Background: Wildlife tourism has been shown to increase stress in a variety of species and can negatively affect the survival, reproduction, welfare, and behaviour of individuals. The use of faecal glucocorticoid metabolites has favoured the development of non-invasive methods to study physiological conditions and could aid in successful and effective strategies for the management and conservation of endangered species. Methods: An experiment was conducted to determine the effect of dietary inclusion of live microbial cultures to find patterns of physiological stress hormone in faeces of 18 safari Asian elephants of 30-62 years age and body weight (3495 +/- 133.34 Kg) for two months. They were randomly divided into three groups, with six elephants in each, i.e. control with no probiotic (T-1) and the other two with probiotics, which contained 1 x 10(9) CFU/g concentrate of Lactobacillus acidophilus (T-2) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (T-3) @ every 50 kg body weight per day. Faecal samples were taken on 0, 30th, 40th and 50th day of the experiment. Result: It was observed that the mean faecal glucocorticoid metabolites, demonstrated by the elephants of T-2 and T-3 groups were not significantly (P>0.05) different from the control group (T-1) and remained unaffected on the supplementation of live microbial cultures.

Automated summary

The study found that providing probiotics to African elephants did not have a significant impact on the levels of physiological stress hormones in their feces.