Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

That animals should be able to express their natural behaviours, even in captivity, has become a more important issue lately. Nowadays Zoos work much more with educating people and helping conservation projects for endangered species. This is two important reasons for making the environment as natural as possible for zoo animals. Both in captivity and in the wild capuchin monkeys have been seen to use tools such as stones and sticks to get food and are therefore seen as a natural and important behaviour for them.

This study was carried out to evaluate a specific sort of environmental enrichment where a group of three capuchins had to use sticks to get different kinds of food out of bottles. The aim of the study was to see if the capuchins’ behaviour changed over time and what influence the food enrichment had on their behaviour. The study was performed during a total of 11 days, three hours per day. Two parallel observation methods were used; instantaneous sampling for behaviour and position versus one-zero sampling for interaction with enrichment and social behaviour.

The results showed that the capuchins resided more in the part of the cage where the enrichment was available (58 % of registered observations), compared to the days when the enrichment was not there (25% of registered observations). In general the behaviour did not change but the “tool use” behaviour increased when the enrichment was available (from 0 to 8 % of the registered observations) and the capuchins were also more visible to the observer. There were large individual variations both in behaviour and in interactions with the enrichment. One of the female capuchins got almost 1/3 of the registered markings in benefit for the behaviour “Interaction with enrichment”- The other female however did not use the sticks inside the bottles at all. It can be concluded that that the capuchins used the enrichment but because of the individual differences in behaviour more studies will be needed in order to fully understand the benefits of this kind of enrichment.