Ethograms

My first go at ethograms was challenging. A lot of my time was spent watching different types of felines sleep; I hadn’t realized that they slept so much, even during the day. Using live cams also made it difficult, because sometimes animals would walk out of range or the camera would focus on another animal, interrupting the observations I was writing down. I discovered that it is a lot easier when the live cam is recording few individuals, so for my ethograms, I chose two live feeds from the San Diego Zoo; Polar Bears and Elephants.

I used pen and paper for both my ethograms, as I was not able to get the Zoo Monitor App working. Luckily I had recorded the videos I was going to use because I tried doing a continuous sampling and it would have been impossible if I was doing it out on the field. It is tough to put down the behavior, the description, and the duration all at the same time. If I had not been able to pause the video, I would have missed many vital behaviors and details. The pen and paper method was convenient because I was using my laptop to watch the animals, and this way, that was the only thing I needed to have on my screen. For my next try, I would like to go out to the field and do an all occurrences sampling. I am hoping that I can move around enough so that I am always able to see the animal and I think this type of sampling is more straightforward and more effective for this situation.

The ethogram exercise was very useful because I watched several behaviors that in isolation would not have meant anything to me. The polar bear ethogram helped me realize that the bear I was observing was “afraid” of the other polar bear. When I first watched the video I recorded, I noticed several behaviors that I thought were completely unrelated, but after watching it again and putting down all the behaviors and descriptions, I realized that a lot of them were in response to this “fear” or this interaction between the two bears.

Elephants - Live Cam at San Diego Zoo

Elephant experts:

• Caitlin E. O’Connell: Focuses on elephant communication and elephant societies. She investigates the role that the propagation and detection of vibrations play in elephant communication.

• Joshua Plotnik: Aims to identify the sensory modalities most relevant to an animal’s physical and social decision-making processes. Wants to use the study of elephant behavior as a tool for mitigating human/elephant conflict.

• Phyllis Lee

• Dr. Cynthia Moss: Focuses on distribution, demography, population dynamics, social organization and behavior of the Amboseli elephants.

Polar Bears - Live Cam at San Diego Zoo

Polar Bear Experts:

• Nikita Ovsyanikov: Has studied the dynamics of the polar bear population and their behaviour on Wrangel Island for decades. He talks about the threats to polar bears and people’s responsibilities to protect them. He has a methodology for preventing and managing conflict between polar bears and humans.

• Todd Atwood: Focuses on spatial ecology, population ecology, predator-prey dynamics, polar bear ecology.

• Dr. Nicholas J. Lunn: Studies dynamics and general ecology of polar bears,and the effects of climatic change on the ecology of polar bears in western Hudson Bay.

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