Abstract

Fishes, cephalopods, and other aquatic animals are frequently kept across zoos, marine parks, and aquariums worldwide. Their diversity across taxa and species makes them interesting and fascinating for the visiting public, as well as challenging to care for, including efforts of assessing and promoting their wellbeing. Compared to mammals, fully aquatic animals are much more sensitive to environmental parameters. Their aquatic lifestyle has required animal care professionals to achieve excellence in water quality, oxygen levels, filtration, and other key environmental aspects to keep the animals alive. While contemporary facilities today have achieved excellence in providing for the basic needs of many animals, the development of holistic animal care and welfare programs, as well as considering the implications and applications of scientific knowledge in many domains, are lacking. The health domain continues to receive far more attention than behaviour, social life, nutrition, human-animal interactions, cognition, animal learning and training, environmental enrichment, and habitats. Understanding different philosophies and scientific approaches to animal welfare and how these can support aquatic animal wellbeing are also important, such as the application of the Five Domains model and the need to consider animal wellbeing 24/7 across the lifespan.^1–3 While the training of fishes and aquatic invertebrates, providing environmental enrichment, and changes in habitat design have shown improvements in wellbeing, these activities are not currently widespread.^4–6 There is a need for dissemination of already existing best practices and development of best practice guidelines for many species housed in human care. There is also a need for more research and dissemination on aquatic animal welfare and the general need to share science that could translate into practical applications.⁷ This presentation presents a 24/7 across-lifetime approach and examples of science into practice to promote optimal aquatic animal wellbeing.

Literature Cited

1.  Fraser D. 2009. Assessing animal welfare: different philosophies, different scientific approaches. Zoo Biology: Published in affiliation with the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, 28(6): 507–518.

2.  Perkins K. 2021. Can Aquatic Invertebrates within Public Aquaria Fit the Five Domain Welfare Model?. Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research, 3(2): 181–204.

3.  Brando S. Buchanan-Smith HM. 2018. The 24/7 approach to promoting optimal welfare for captive wild animals. Behavioural Processes, 156: 83–95.

4.  Corwin AL. 2012. Training fish and aquatic invertebrates for husbandry and medical behaviors. Veterinary Clinics of North America-ExoticAnimal Practice, 15(3): 455.

5.  Monreal-Pawlowsky T, Vaicekauskaitė R, Membrive GP, Delfour F, Manteca X. 2021. Goal-oriented behavioural and environmental enrichment in aquarium species. Journal of Zoo and Aquarium Research, 9(4): 273–280.

6.  Lawrence K, Sherwen SL, Larsen H. 2021. Natural Habitat Design for Zoo-Housed Elasmobranch and Teleost Fish Species Improves Behavioural Repertoire and Space Use in a Visitor Facing Exhibit. Animals, 11(10): 2979.

7.  Cronin K.A. 2021. Working to Supply the Demand: Recent Advances in the Science of Zoo Animal Welfare. Journal of Zoological and Botanical Gardens, 2(3), pp.349–350.