Perspectives on the Continuum of Wild to Captive Behaviour

Zoo studies in primate physiology, health, and welfare

“…Instead, much of the research carried out on nonhuman primates in zoos is conducted by zoo‐employed scientists who have a broader taxonomic focus or by students and professionals in fields like animal welfare or conservation biology. This may be due to earlier dichotomies in fields such as biological anthropology suggesting that only primates in the wild were “natural” and so, by definition, zoo‐living primates were “unnatural” and could not improve our understanding of humans (Rodrigues et al, 2023). While some studies of zoo‐housed primates are on research areas of interest to biological anthropologists, such as the evolution of bipedalism (Videan & McGrew, 2002) or life history stages like adrenarche (Behringer et al, 2012) and menopause (Atsalis & Margulis, 2006), few work in this setting.…”

“…For example, daily travel distances in gorillas (Ross & Shender, 2016) and activity budgets in ring‐tailed lemurs ( Lemur catta ) (Caselli et al, 2022) were similar between wild populations and those in human care. As Rodrigues et al (2023) point out, there are no longer primate communities truly unaffected by anthropogenic pressures and primates now live along a continuum of environments that have “continuous, overlapping anthropogenic and observer effects.” As such, they encourage researchers to view primate behavior observed in zoos not as artefacts of this setting but instead as evidence of their behavioral adaptability (Rodrigues et al, 2023). I hope the articles herein demonstrate that physiology also plays a role in primates' ability to adapt to a wide range of circumstances and that physiological research on zoo collections can contribute to a number of disciplines.…”