The development of stereotypic behavior in caged european starlings, Sturnus vulgaris

Abstract

Stereotypic behavior in captive animals has been hypothesized to emerge from thwarted natural behavior patterns and is thought to be more common in captive-reared animals. However, data on the early stages of developing stereotypies are currently scarce. We compared the development of stereotypic route-tracing and somersaulting in hand-reared and wild-caught starlings placed in individual cages for the first time. We found that wild-caught birds were less active but showed more escape motivation and more evidence of route-tracing behavior. Furthermore, somersaulting was only observed in wild-caught birds. Development of somersaulting was predicted by subtle differences in behavior during the first few days in cages and developed in individuals with low levels of route-tracing behavior. Our data suggest a role for escape motivation in the development of starling stereotypies and additionally that route-tracing and somersaulting may represent alternative outlets for thwarted escape. In contrast to observations from mammals, our results show that stereotypies are more common in wild-caught starlings.

Assessing Video Presentations as Environmental Enrichment for Laboratory Birds

“…Other sequences that were less or not described or recognized were simply considered as abnormal repetitive behaviours (ARBs). Most of these behaviours have been already described by other authors [19], [20], [22]. We describe below the only SB and the 5 ARBs that we observed.…”

“…Although five days may appear as a rather short period of time, it has been shown that starlings can exhibit SBs within a week of being placed in a cage [20]. Moreover, this time span was sufficient for us to observe significant effects of the video presentations compared to the controls and significant changes between the first and the last days of the experiment (see results).…”

“…In European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris , the most common SB is somersaulting. This behaviour is thought to develop from thwarted escape attempts that become chronic [19], [20], [22]. Interestingly, SBs and other ARBs differ according to starlings' previous experience: wild-caught starlings are more likely to develop ARBs than hand-reared starlings are [23], [24].…”

Quantifying the offensive sequences that result in goals in elite futsal matches

“…As stated by Magnusson (2000, p. 94), "that is, if A is an earlier and B a later component of the same recurring temporal pattern then after an occurrence of A at t, there is an interval [t+d1, t +d2] (d2≥d1≥d0) that tends to contain at least one occurrence of B more often than would be expected by chance". This software has been extensively used in several areas of knowledge both in animal (Feenders & Bateson, 2012;Nicol, Segonds-Pichon, & Magnusson, 2015) and human studies (Sandman, Kemp, Mabini, Pincus, & Magnusson, 2012;Woods, Yefimova, & Brecht, 2014).…”

T-pattern analysis for the study of temporal structure of animal and human behavior: A comprehensive review

“…The number of different T-patterns and the total number of T-patterns detected have been used as measures of route-tracing behavior. Results demonstrated that wild-caught starlings showed higher numbers of T-patterns indicating more route-tracing (Feenders and Bateson, 2012). Interestingly, some evidence showed that hand-reared starlings were noticeably less neophobic and less impulsive than wild-caught ones (Feenders and Bateson, 2013).…”