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

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 surfac...

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Autores principales: Schiffmann, Christian, Hellriegel, Linda, Clauss, Marcus, Brother Stefan, Knibbs, Kevin, Wenker, Christian, Hård, Therese, Galeffi, Cordula
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10083898/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35363895
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21693
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author Schiffmann, Christian
Hellriegel, Linda
Clauss, Marcus
Brother Stefan,
Knibbs, Kevin
Wenker, Christian
Hård, Therese
Galeffi, Cordula
author_facet Schiffmann, Christian
Hellriegel, Linda
Clauss, Marcus
Brother Stefan,
Knibbs, Kevin
Wenker, Christian
Hård, Therese
Galeffi, Cordula
author_sort Schiffmann, Christian
collection PubMed
description 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.
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spelling pubmed-100838982023-04-11 From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants Schiffmann, Christian Hellriegel, Linda Clauss, Marcus Brother Stefan, Knibbs, Kevin Wenker, Christian Hård, Therese Galeffi, Cordula Zoo Biol Research Articles 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. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2022-04-01 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10083898/ /pubmed/35363895 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21693 Text en © 2022 The Authors. Zoo Biology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Schiffmann, Christian
Hellriegel, Linda
Clauss, Marcus
Brother Stefan,
Knibbs, Kevin
Wenker, Christian
Hård, Therese
Galeffi, Cordula
From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title_full From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title_fullStr From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title_full_unstemmed From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title_short From left to right all through the night: Characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
title_sort from left to right all through the night: characteristics of lying rest in zoo elephants
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10083898/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35363895
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21693
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