Understanding food preference among animals in human care can support improvements to welfare through training and day-to-day care (e.g., diet management).Little has been published about food preference in zoo-housed meerkats. Assessing meerkat food preference would be useful, not only for the welfare of that species, but also for developing approaches to assessing food preference in other grouphoused, social species. The specific aim of this study was to quantify food preference within the meerkat mob at Wellington Zoo. We developed a simple, cost-effective method for characterizing the food preference hierarchy in meerkats by presenting pairs of foods to the mob as a group. We observed stable preference with the hierarchy for pups closely resembling that for adults. This study demonstrated that it is possible to assess food preference and identify a food preference hierarchy for a group of animals from a social species where it was neither practical nor appropriate to assess individuals' preferences separately.

Many zoos provide the opportunity for visitors to interact with ambassador animals in their collections, but little is known about how these interactions impact on the animals themselves. The current study was the first to examine the effect of visitor interactions on the reptile species, tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus). This pilot project also developed the first complete ethogram describing tuatara behaviour (a permanent research resource). The ethogram was customised for individually housed tuatara. We used the ethogram to describe behaviour of three tuatara before (8:30-10:30), during (10:30-11:30) and after (11:30-15:30) visitor contact sessions (where visitors could interact with a tuatara and handler in a controlled environment), and on control days (at the same times but with no visitor contact). Tuatara demonstrated increased time out of sight or time inactive following visitor contact (compared to days with no visitor contact). The current study provides insight into individual variation between animals that participate in visitor contact sessions and can inform how zoos approach ambassador-animal programmes to support animal welfare.