ANIMAL BEHAVIOR ZOO PROJECT

During your visit to the zoo, you observe one animal for two hours. You will construct an ethogram and do a space utilization analysis. Brown (1975) defines an ethogram as a set of comprehensive descriptions of the characteristic behavior patterns of a species. An ethogram is a result of many hours of naturalistic observation. Ethologists first used ethograms, and eventually, psychologists also began to use ethograms. Ethograms can be used for a variety of purposes. Ethograms may be used to catalog an animal’s behavior, study the duration of behaviors under different conditions, establish a hierarchy of behaviors, or, as you will do in your zoo study, look for behavior patterns. Zoos have used space utilization analysis to get an idea of which exhibit area the animals use. This analysis provides additional behavior information and can be used to modify existing exhibits and design future exhibits. You will continuously record an animal’s behavior for 2 hours and plot its location at 2-minute intervals. Before you start your observation session, watch the animal for 10 – 20 minutes and look for the most frequently occurring behaviors. Also, draw a schematic diagram of the exhibit and divide it into four quadrants. The quadrants do not have to be equal in size. After this preliminary investigation, choose five behaviors that you will record.

**EXAMPLE**

Let us say that you decide to observe the red panda, and the five behaviors you decide to look at are climbing (C), digging (D), eating (E), running (R), and jumping (J). Next, you record the data, which is what you get.

D -> E -> R -> J -> C -> J -> C -> J -> C -> D -> E -> R -> D -> E -> R -> D -> E

Next you will construct an ethogram based on the above data. The first step is to set up a matrix and tally up the observed behavior sequences. The column headings represent the initial behavior, and the row headings represent the behavior following the initial behavior.

You will construct a second matrix, based on the first matrix, to get the probabilities of one behavior following another. This will show you if the transitions between two or more behaviors depend on one another at some probability greater than chance. For the fractions in each cell, the denominator represents the total number of times the behavior (column heading) occurred, and the numerator represents the total number of times the behavior followed this behavior in the row heading.

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The beginning of your field report should state the time of day, temperature, and cloud cover for each day. Next you should provide the scientific name and a physical (size & color) description of the animal you observe. Next, describe the animal

natural habitat
— African savannah, rain forest, desert, swamp (this habitat description should be about one paragraph). Next, provide the two matrices for the ethogram, followed by a paragraph discussing any behavior patterns you see based on your ethogram. For this analysis your primary directive is to find a pattern if one exists. Finally we turn to look at space utilization. First, you should have a sketch of your animal’s enclosure with dash lines indicating where your quadrants. Each quadrant should have a Roman numeral identifying the quadrant and a number indicating how many times you observed that animal in the quadrant. For your space utilization analysis, find out if the animal is spending more time in certain areas of the exhibit or if the animal is randomly moving through the exhibit. Use the Chi-square -goodness of fit to help you draw your conclusions. Your last paragraph in the paper will be based on what you concluded from this space utilization analysis. Did the animal spend more time in one area versus the other, if so, why? Did it move around randomly?

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