Studies On Behavior And Ecophysiology Of Captive South China Tiger

The South China tiger once was the widest spread sub-speices of tiger. In 1950s, it is estimated that there are about 4000 individual in China. However, since large-scale hunting, habitat losing and smashing, short of food and so on, the number of population drop down drastically. Now there is about less 20 tigers in the wild, meanwhile the primary population of South China tiger is bred in captive in some zoological park such as guiyang zoo, suzhou zoo and shanghai zoo. The captive breeding of South China tiger was origin in 1955, and the family builder were derived from 6 tigers captured from guizhou and fujian province.As the wild population is too low to continue this species, and the only way to save the dangerous species is take advantage of captive population to restore. But in the long time breeding, the hunting ability, propagate, disease resistience ability are all degenerated. So we obsevere and research the captive South China tiger behavior pattern, activity rhythm and phsiological indices in order to know the behavior characters, relation between propagate and hormone, and accumulate useful reference material for population restoration in future.We observed diurnal time budget found that activity (37.92%) ,resting (25.62 %) and sleeping (29.38 %) made up the majority of diurnal time. In rhythm, peak of activity was recorded at 8: 00 - 9: 00, and peaks of resting at 10: 00 - 11: 00 and 15: 30 - 16: 30. peaks of sleeping at 11: 00 - 14: 00. As the breeding way, eating was just recorded at 9: 00 - 10: 00. In other behaviors, sniffing was the most frequently, grooming and roaring were less, rubbing, drinking, defcating, licking were least frequuent. In addition, there are same trend but a little different in seasonal rhythm, the activity and sleeping are significant different between in semi-free enclosure (34.87 + 2.74) and in cage (44.73 + 3.82) , but the activity in cage were more stereotypic behaviors than in semi-free enclosure. However, resting, eating, and standing are no significant difference between in cage and in semi-free enclosure. For other behaviors, licking, sniffing and drinking are different, but defcating, grooming and roaring are not different.In order to get to know the useage pattern of semi-free enclosure, we divided the area into 48 parts and count the frequency of every part, we founded that there are 3 kinds of parts for South China tiger use more frequently. 1st, the feeding area, close to the door; in the morning the tigers walk around and wait for feeding. 2nd, near water, there are no trees and barriers in these parts, tigers always rest and walk in there. 3rd,...