Publications by authors named "L von Fersen"

Ensuring high standards of animal welfare is not only an ethical duty for zoos and aquariums, but it is also essential to achieve their conservation, education, and research goals. While for some species, animal welfare assessment frameworks are already in place, little has been done for marine animals under human care. Responding to this demand, the welfare committee of the European Association for Aquatic Mammals (EAAM) set up a group of experts on welfare science, cetacean biology, and zoo animal medicine across Europe.

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Automated monitoring systems have become increasingly important for zoological institutions in the study of their animals' behavior. One crucial processing step for such a system is the re-identification of individuals when using multiple cameras. Deep learning approaches have become the standard methodology for this task.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study examined the welfare effects of deflighting (feather-clipping) on great white pelicans in German zoos, focusing on different flight statuses: irreversibly deflighted, reversibly deflighted, and airworthy.
  • Behavioral observations and feather corticosterone concentration (CORTf) measurements were used to assess stress levels among 215 pelicans across various exhibits.
  • Results indicated that reversibly deflighted pelicans showed higher stress levels than airworthy ones, and factors like group size and fluttering behavior were linked to increased stress, suggesting that fluttering could be a sign of stress in these birds.
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Deflighting zoo birds is a practice that receives increasing criticism due to its presumed incompatibility with animal welfare. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to address this problem in a scientific way. To do this, we compared feather corticosterone (CORTf) from Greater Flamingos (, n = 151) of different flight status (i.

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