A Comparative Perspective on Three Primate Species' Responses to a Pictorial Emotional Stroop Task.

The Stroop effect describes interference in cognitive processing due to competing cognitive demands. Presenting emotionally laden stimuli creates similar Stroop-like effects that result from participants' attention being drawn to distractor stimuli. Here, we adapted the methods of a pictorial Stroop study for use with chimpanzees (N = 6), gorillas (N = 7), and Japanese macaques (N = 6).

Do zoo visitors induce attentional bias effects in primates completing cognitive tasks?

While previous research has focused on the impact of visitors on zoo-housed animals' behavior, here, we evaluated the impact of visitors on the performance of four zoo-housed Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) in a cognitive task. The macaques completed a touchscreen-based match-to-sample task in glass-sided booths at the perimeter of their enclosure, adjacent to a visitor viewing area. The task was novel to all macaques at the start of this study but over the 6-month testing period the macaques showed increased accuracy on the task, suggestive of learning.

Non-invasive methods to measure inter-renal function in aquatic salamanders-correlating fecal corticosterone to the environmental and physiologic conditions of captive .

This study sought to develop non-invasive techniques to monitor glucocorticoids in captive as a means to correlate inter-renal gland function in relation to environmental and physiological changes. Six individually housed breeding pairs of captive were subjected to seasonal changes in water temperature (30°F temperature differential) to stimulate natural breeding, specifically spermatophore deposition and oviposition. An enzyme immunoassay was validated for the measurement of faecal corticosterone metabolites (CMs) by exhibiting parallelism and accuracy to the standard curve.

Growth rates of juvenile Boa constrictor under two feeding regimes.

Many husbandry routines in zoo herpetology are based on tradition, authoritarianism, anecdote, or speculation. However, relatively few empirical studies underlie many very common practices. We compared growth rates among littermates of Boa constrictor raised under two feeding regimes that were identical in terms of the mass of food ingested, but differed in weekly versus bi-weekly schedules.