Williams Ellen, Hunton Violet, Hosey Geoff, Ward Samantha J
Department of Animal Health, Behaviour & Welfare, Harper Adams University, Newport TF10 8NB, UK.
Deane Campus, University of Bolton, Bolton BL3 5AB, UK.
Animals (Basel). 2023 Mar 28;13(7):1178. doi: 10.3390/ani13071178.
Visitors are a prominent feature in the lives of zoo animals, and their presence can cause a range of impacts on zoo animals (typically classed as positive, negative or neutral impacts), commonly referred to as the 'visitor effect'. This paper quantitatively collates the literature on the visitor effect in non-primate species, investigates the types of measures used to assess impacts of visitors on animals and considers whether impacts vary across non-primate species in zoos. In total, there were 105 papers which had investigated the impact of zoo visitors on 252 non-primate species/species groups. There has been a steady increase in visitor effect research in zoos since 2012 and this body of work incorporates species from avian (28% study species), reptilian (9%), amphibian (2%), fish (4%) and invertebrate taxa (1%). However, there is still a bias towards mammalian species (56%). The response to visitors varied across taxa. Amphibians responded negatively to visitors more frequently than would be expected by chance ( < 0.05), birds responded neutrally more frequently than would be expected by chance ( < 0.05) and fish responded neutrally and 'unknown' more frequently than would be expected by chance ( < 0.05). This review highlighted a number of animal-based metrics which have been used to assess the impacts of visitors on animals, with measures used varying across taxa. Moving forwards, it is recommended that moving forwards researchers incorporate a suite of measures, incorporating those which are meaningful in terms of being representative of individual animal experiences and animal welfare, collected in a manner which should capture those metrics accurately.
游客是动物园动物生活中的一个显著特征，他们的存在会对动物园动物产生一系列影响（通常分为正面、负面或中性影响），通常被称为“游客效应”。本文对非灵长类动物游客效应的文献进行了定量整理，调查了用于评估游客对动物影响的测量类型，并考虑了动物园中非灵长类动物的影响是否存在差异。总共有105篇论文研究了动物园游客对252种非灵长类物种/物种组的影响。自2012年以来，动物园游客效应研究稳步增加，这一系列研究涵盖了鸟类（研究物种的28%）、爬行类（9%）、两栖类（2%）、鱼类（4%）和无脊椎动物类群（1%）的物种。然而，研究仍偏向于哺乳动物物种（56%）。不同分类群对游客的反应各不相同。两栖类对游客的负面反应比随机预期的更频繁（<0.05），鸟类的中性反应比随机预期的更频繁（<0.05），鱼类的中性反应和“未知”反应比随机预期的更频繁（<0.05）。本综述强调了一些基于动物的指标，这些指标已被用于评估游客对动物的影响，不同分类群使用的测量方法各不相同。展望未来，建议研究人员采用一系列测量方法，包括那些在代表个体动物经历和动物福利方面有意义的方法，并以能够准确捕捉这些指标的方式进行收集。
