animal welfare

Animal Welfare – Blanding’s Turtles

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Stephanie Allard, PhD. is the Director of Animal Welfare for the Detroit Zoological Society and oversees the Center for Zoo Animal Welfare.

Part of the Detroit Zoological Society’s (DZS) mission is to demonstrate leadership in wildlife conservation and animal welfare. This includes taking a compassionate approach to conservation projects. Often, conservation actions, such as programs that reintroduce animals into wild habitats, are more focused on protecting species or populations, and this can come at a cost to Blanding's turtleindividual animals. For some species, personality traits may be linked to survival success when animals are returned to the wild. Therefore, we designed a study to look for personality traits in Blanding’s turtles, a species of special concern in the state of Michigan that the DZS has been helping to reintroduce into the wild.

In this study, turtles are hatched and raised at the Detroit Zoo and are released when they reach a size that would make them less likely to be killed and eaten by raccoons and other predators. Some of the turtles are fitted with GPS trackers prior to being released so their movements can be followed.

Blanding's turtleThe goal of the personality project was twofold: First, we hoped to uncover personality traits in the turtles, as little animal personality research has focused on reptiles. The 24 turtles selected to wear trackers underwent simple behavioral tests to determine how likely they were to explore, acquire food, and how they responded to seeing themselves in a mirror which can tell us about their reaction to other turtles. Preliminary results of the behavioral tests suggest that several personality traits may be present in the turtles, including boldness and exploration.

Blanding's turtleThe next step will be to use the information shared with us by the field biologists to see if personality traits had any impact on how well each turtle did during the year following their release. This kind of information could help to make the best possible decisions when deciding where to release individual turtles in order to maximize their success in returning to the wild.

– Dr. Stephanie Allard

Animal Welfare: Penguin Project

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Stephanie Allard, Ph.D., is the Director of Animal Welfare for the Detroit Zoological Society.

The Detroit Zoological Society is home to the Center for Zoo Animal Welfare. Among the goals of the center is to conduct research that can help us to better understand and improve the welfare of animals living in zoos. One of the ways in which we do this is by studying how the animals at the Zoo are interacting with each other and with their environment.

This type of research is really important when we are designing new habitats for the animals. The Zoo is currently constructing a new state-of-the-art Polk Penguin Conservation Center (PPCC) that will house four species of penguins: king, macaroni, rockhopper and gentoo. The PPCC is designed to allow for a wide variety of species-appropriate behaviors and for the penguins to have greater choice and control in their environment.

The new habitat provides us with a greatopportunity to compare the behavior and well-being of the same group of penguins in two very different living spaces: their current home in the Penguinarium and their future home in the PPCC. This project is off to a great start! We collected behavioral data on a subset of penguins to test out our methodology and are now observing 27 of the penguins – something we will keep doing for a year after they move to the PPCC.

Technology is playing a part in this, as we are using data loggers, small trackers that some of the penguins will wear like a flipper bracelet that will tell us how much time they are spending in the water and at what depth.  This will be especially important in their new habitat, as that pool will be four times the depth of their current one.

If you see one of our data collectors in the Penguinarium during your next visit to the Zoo, ask them about this cool project!

– Dr. Stephanie Allard