Zoo Visit

Central Park Zoo

During my visit to the Central Park Zoo, I decided to observe lemurs, because there were no foxes I could observe. The type of lemurs they have is Ruffed Lemurs, and they can be found in the Tropic Zone: The Rainforest Exhibit.

Ethogram

I had a hard time trying to observe these lemurs because they are incredibly fast and they move all over the place. I went from trying to do my ethogram right there to try to record them, but that wasn’t completely successful either. I kept losing the lemur I had chosen to follow because they either jumped behind a tree and I no longer was sure I was following the same one when it came from behind it, or sometimes I couldn’t move around because people were watching the lemurs. I have several short clips of different lemurs, but I did successfully follow the same one for 12 minutes and 35 seconds. For this round of ethograms, I decided to do instantaneous sampling with my time interval being 30 seconds.

I was not a fan of the instantaneous sampling because I observed so many interesting behaviors that I wanted to put down, but they would happen in between my intervals. I think even though continuous is hard to do, it is my favorite technique so far.

Homonculus

While I was observing the lemurs, the part of the body that I saw them use the most to interact with the world was their hands. They used them to hold their food, to hang from branches, to hold on to branches, and to scratch themselves. They also use their feet to do a lot of things, but not as much as their hands. The third thing I saw them use the most was their mouth and nose. Their tail mostly just hung, sometimes they would grab it and groom it, but I did not observe the tail being used for anything.

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AEIOU

Behavioral Mapping

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