Animal Cognition Research Group

Thesis title:
The behaviour of African elephants, Loxodonta africana, at Madikwe Game Reserve, South Africa

Supervisory team:
Dr Nicola Koyama, Prof Serge Wich, Dr Antje Engelhardt

Funding/collaborators:
AESOP Erasmus Mundus scholarship, LJMU Matched Funding Scholarship
Hosted by the Centre for Wildlife Management at the University of Pretoria and North West Parks Board

Summary of PhD:
Madikwe Game Reserve holds over 1000 elephants, presenting the highest density of elephants in South Africa. I study their behavioural ecology with a special interest to stress-related and aggressive behaviour. Five minute focal animal observations as well as herd scan samples are carried out on known as well as random individuals. Additionally, I collect faecal samples for stress hormone and thyroid hormone analysis and record vocalisations for analysis of fundamental frequency. Satellite collared females provide spatial data for home range and spatial use analysis.

Preliminary results showed that game drive vehicle presence did not increase stress-related or aggressive behaviour in elephants. Data collection is ongoing and will finish at the end of June 2017 upon which faecal samples will be analysed and statistical analysis of all data will be carried out.

Future plans:
I would like to carry on doing field based research of elephants after I finish my PhD.

Thesis title:
Attention bias: a new tool for welfare assessment in captive rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).

Supervisory team:
Director of studies: Dr Emily Bethell
Additional supervisors: Dr Antje Engelhardt, Dr Craig Wilding

Funding/collaborators:
Leatherbarrow scholarship

Summary of PhD:
The way humans attend to and interpret information is associated with self-reported feelings of wellbeing and physiological changes neuromodulatory hormones known anxiolytic and anxiogenic functions [1-3]. Laboratory-based cognitive tasks that record responses (e.g. eye-movements or reaction speed) to emotional stimuli have revealed that biases in attention reliably map onto physiological and self-reported measures of affect [1]. Life-history and genetic factors have also been associated with these biases and, in humans, an attention bias profile can be used to identify individuals who are vulnerable to poor psychological health when faced with stressful life events [1]. Previous studies have shown that these methods may be adapted to measure attention bias in non-human primates, providing a new measure of welfare, an area notoriously difficult to assess [4-6]. The study will build on recent work, showing attention bias to be a promising new method of welfare assessment, to validate a state-of-the-art eye-tracking tool to non-invasively assess welfare in captive primates. One-hundred female rhesus macaques will be involved in this part of the study and data collection will occur before and after the macaques’ annual health check, an acutely stressful event. Following this, the next step in non-human primate attention bias research is to understand the underlying biological mechanisms. This is crucial for gaining a rounded understanding of the role of attention bias in the aetiology and maintenance of affect-related disorders in non-human primates. Urinary oxytocin and faecal cortisol samples will be collected from 30 macaques to determine if these hormones correlate with shifts in attention bias.

References

1. Bar-Haim, Y., Lamy, D., Pergamin, L., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J. & van IJzendoorn, M.H. (2007) Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study, Psychol Bull, 133(1), 1-24.
2. Donaldson, Z.R. & Young, L.J. (2008) Oxytocin, vasopressin, and the neurogenetics of sociality, Science, 322, 900-904.
3. Ardayfio, P. & Kim, K. (2006) Anxiogenic-like effects of chronic corticosterone in light-dark emergence tasks in mice, Behav Neurosci, 120(2), 249-256.
4. Bethell, E.J., Holmes, A., McLarnon, A. & Semple S. (2012b) Evidence that emotion mediates social attention in rhesus macaques, PloS ONE, 7(8), e44387.
5. Bethell, E.J., Holmes, A. & Semple, A. (2012a) Cognitive bias in a non-human primate: husbandry procedures influence cognitive indicators of psychological well-being in captive rhesus macaques, Anim Welfare, 21(2), 185-195.
6. Bethell, E.J., Holmes, A., McLarnon, A. & Semple, S. (2016) Emotion evaluation and response slowing in a non-human primate: New directions for cognitive bias measures of animal emotion?, Behav Sci, 6(1), 2, doi:10.3390/bs6010002.

Future plans:
I want to continue to work improving the welfare of captive non-human primates, both in the UK and abroad, through research and working direct with animals and people in zoos and laboratories.