Meeting Abstract
The extent to which captive environments facilitate physically similar experiences to those in the wild is important to health and husbandry decisions and to the interpretation of captive behavioral and experimental studies. We examined locomotor behavior and overall dynamic body acceleration (ODBA) in two lemurs in different cage environments at the Duke Lemur Center in order to assess the extent to which available space and substrate variety influence locomotor behavior and energy expenditure. Propithecus verreauxi and Lemur catta are primates endemic to Madagascar that live sympatrically in some areas yet are very different in terms of group size, substrate use (L. catta are the most terrestrial of lemurs while P. verreauxi are primarily vertical clingers and leapers), and life history patterns. We predicted that in both species, animals would exhibit more leaping and higher ODBA in the larger natural habitat enclosures (NHEs) than in the caged enclosures (CGEs). We attached inertial sensors to 7 P. verreauxi and 4 L. catta as they moved both in their CGE and their NHE environments. We used a custom Matlab program to quantify leaping bouts and ODBA and validated the program using focal animal behavioral sampling. Our results indicate that, contrary to expectations, animals used more leaps per hour, higher ODBA, and more activity in the CGEs than NHEs. We suggest these differences were a result of the relative complexity of the CGE enclosure as well as the spacing tendencies of the animals. These data suggest that animals do behave differently in different captive environments (and captive vs. wild) but that these differences cannot be predicted by space alone, and factors influencing these behaviors are species-specific.
