Taylor Readyhough

• Master of Science
• PhD Student at University of New Hampshire

Male associations are a typical component of elephant society, allowing bulls to practice appropriate social behavior. To improve zoo elephant welfare, it is important to provide bulls with social opportunities. In fall 2018, Denver Zoo added two bull Asian elephants to its existing all-male group of three bulls, offering the opportunity to conduct...

There is a growing need for animal care institutions to house multiple bull elephants as the population increases due to transfers from private ownership and the births of male offspring in managed care. Elephants in North American, European, and Latin American zoos exhibit stereotypies—repetitive, fixed behaviors. Previous research demonstrated th...

Wild bull Asian elephants spend time in all-male groups. Therefore, managers of ex situ populations increasingly house bulls together. We examined the social interactions of five bull Asian elephants at Denver Zoo, using instantaneous sampling to compare social interactions across adolescent and mature bulls, and bulls with a social history prior t...

Forest fragmentation increases forest edge relative to forest interior, with lower vegetation quality common for primates in edge zones. Because most primates live in human-modified tropical forests within 1 km of edge, it is critical to understand how primates cope with edge effects. Few studies have investigated how primates inhabiting a fragment...

In the face of the growing global biodiversity crisis, we must critically examine factors driving patterns in research to identify knowledge gaps, guide future funding and inform conservation policies and actions. In this article, we reviewed the literature on terrestrial mammals in the contiguous United States to evaluate which factors influence t...

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus; hereafter “deer”) are keystone herbivores that exert considerable ecosystem impacts. Quantifying drivers of urban deer demography, including fecundity (number of fetuses/doe), is paramount for understanding deer ecology and making management decisions, but this information is lacking for urban deer populat...

Male Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) sociality is complex and understudied. Increasingly, researchers recognize the role of mature bull elephants in shaping adolescent males’ appropriate social and reproductive behaviours that enable them to have normal intra-species relationships after the adolescents leave their natal herds. We describe a specif...

Bull elephants in zoos are often housed alone during musth, a reproductive period characterized by physiological and behavioral changes. Understanding how musth alters bull elephants’ activity budget can improve bull elephant management and allow managers to better assess and meet bulls’ welfare needs. We assessed activity of bull Asian elephants a...

Bull Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) sociality is complex and understudied. Increasingly, researchers recognize the role of mature bull elephants in teaching adolescent bulls appropriate social and reproductive behaviours that enable them to have normal intra-species relationships after the adolescents leave their natal herds. We describe a specif...

Zoological institutions aim to continually improve the lives of the animals under their stewardship. To this end, bull elephants are now increasingly maintained in all-male groups to mimic social conditions observed in the wild. While cortisol is the most frequently used “stress” biomarker, secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA) as a measure of health a...

Popular evening events, such as Zoo Lights, increase the exposure of animals in managed care to stressors such as artificial light and noise, which may alter their behavior and negatively affect animal well-being. The pair of great Indian hornbills (Buceros bicornis) at Denver Zoo provided an opportunity to study the impacts of these stressors beca...

To evaluate elephant welfare, it is important to understand their use of time both during day and night. The length of social relationships can influence how much time they spend in different activities. We assessed daytime and nighttime activity budgets of male Asian elephants at Denver Zoo and examined how length of relationships influenced night...

AZA Connect magazine, AZA CGF grant update. Published in the January issue, available to AZA members at: https://assets.speakcdn.com/assets/2332/web_connect_january_2021.pdf