Although unreported in wild orca populations, mosquito-transmitted diseases have killed at least two captive orcas (Orcinus orca) in U.S. theme parks. St. Louis Encephalitis Virus (SLEV) was implicated in the 1990 death of the male orca Kanduke, held at SeaWorld of Florida. In the second case, West Nile Virus (WNV) killed male orca Taku at SeaWorld of Texas in 2007. Captive environments increas...

—The use of captive animals for population re-establishment or augmentation can be an important part of conservation efforts, but practitioners need experimentally derived evidence to guide the best strategies and inform whether such practices could be successful. Here, we examined how several manipulations to captive-rearing practices influence the performance of the Common Watersnake, Nerodia...

Orangutans (Pongo spp.), Asia's only great apes, are threatened in their survival due to habitat loss, hunting and infections. Nematodes of the genus Strongyloides may represent a severe cause of death in wild and captive individuals. In order to better understand which Strongyloides species/subspecies infect orangutans under different conditions, larvae were isolated from fecal material collec...

Desert birds often experience a scarcity of drinking water and food and must survive episodes of high ambient temperature (T(a)). The physiological mechanisms that promote survival during extended periods of high T(a) have received little attention. We investigated the physiological responses of wild-caught and captive-reared Houbara bustards, Chlamydotis macqueenii, to T(a) values ranging from...

Blood films were examined from 154 wild and captive tortoises from four provinces of South Africa, including Gauteng, Kwazulu-Natal, North West and Western Cape. The five species ofchelonians studied were Chersina angulata (Schweigger), Kinixys belliana belliana (Gray), K. lobatsiana Power, K. natalensis Hewitt, and Stigmochelys pardalis (Bell). Two species of haemogregarines, previously report...

As many studies of cognition and behavior involve captive animals, assessing any psychological impact of captive conditions is an important goal for comparative researchers. Ferdowsian and colleagues (2011) sought to address whether captive chimpanzees show elevated signs of psychopathology relative to wild apes. They modified a checklist of diagnostic criteria for major depression and posttrau...

Management strategies associated with captive breeding of endangered species can establish opportunities for transfer of pathogens and genetic elements between human and animal microbiomes. The class 1 integron is a mobile genetic element associated with clinical antibiotic resistance in gram-negative bacteria. We examined the gut microbiota of endangered brush-tail rock wallabies Petrogale pen...

Wildlife tourism (WT) is an emerging sector of tourism, majorly meant to view and/or encounter wildlife in the wild, captive, and semi-captive settings. Because new economies, there increased demand for destinations both, developing developed nations. However, a comprehensive study lacking WT. In this context, present seeks bring together discuss key findings on WT from literature propose appro...

Proper feeding management of wild animals in captivity incorporates both husbandry skills and applied nutritional sciences. As a basic foundation of animal management, nutrition is integral to longevity, disease prevention, growth and reproduction, yet has received insufficient focus in the zoological community, although somewhat more detailed attention has been paid to free-ranging wildlife, p...

Among the artiodactyla, the suids are a group whose digestive physiology has hardly been investigated. The apparent digestibilities (aD) of macronutrients were measured in captive specimens of warthog (Phacochoerus africanus), red river hog (Potamochoerus porcus), and Visayan warty pigs (Sus cebifrons), and compared with those reported for babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa) from the same facility o...