I'm an international student from the Netherlands studying applied biology at HAS University and, during my internship at the Toronto Zoo, I’ll be studying why and how stereotypic behaviour occurs in polar bears, specifically focusing on the youngest female polar bear “Juno.”
From a young age I was fascinated by animals, so when it came time to apply for my international internship I wrote to several zoos and research programs around the world. Maria Franke, manager of Welfare Science at the Toronto Zoo, responded to my email. I learned that the Toronto Zoo would like to do behaviour studies on one of their juvenile polars bears.
In the last two-and-a-half months, I have learned how special it is to work for a zoo that puts their animal’s welfare as the top priority. Doing research to achieve this goal for the Toronto Zoo and working with polar bears has been a dream come true.
One of the priorities in modern zoos is the overall welfare of their animals. Here in Scarborough, the Toronto Zoo’s Welfare Science Department is dedicated to improving the welfare of its animals every day. What is welfare science and what does it mean for the Toronto Zoo? Animal welfare refers to the combination of an animal’s physical, mental, and emotional states over a period of time. The goal of the Toronto Zoo is to optimize animal welfare by doing research that involves collecting behavioural and physiological data.
What zoo visitors observe is that sometimes carnivores in human care such as big cats, wolves, and bears can show repetitive behaviour like pacing, head swinging, etc., which biologists call stereotypic behaviour.
Stereotypic behaviour can occur for a variety of reasons, and can sometimes occur as a reaction to a stressor, or be in anticipation of an exciting event. In some cases, these behaviours become a habit and are hard to break or stop. Our goal in providing optimal welfare is to create dymanic habitats and stimulating environments to prevent these behaviour patterns from starting, and allow our bears to exhibit choice within their habitats.
Behavioural observations can help us get a better idea of how animals spend their time, what are some favourite enrichment objects or exhibit areas, and also help us determine the influence of seasonal changes, visitor density, diet changes, exhibit changes, and the impact of noise may have on our polar bears. In combination, we are also conducting physiological data collections including fecal samples, where we are analyzing stress and reproductive hormones. Ultimately, the combination of these two research data sets will help us figure out what the potential triggers are that cause stereotypic behaviours and most importantly how we can change our management approach to help prevent them from occurring in the first place. All this research is done to improve the overall well-being of our Toronto Zoo polar bears and polar bears in other zoos around the world.
Sophie de Vos is a Welfare Research Intern in Conservation Science with the Toronto Zoo.