Animal behavior of Loxodonta africana Diana Sadowski Abstract We observed the behavior of the African elephant ( Loxodonta Africana)

through the San Diego Zoo website and created an activity budget for the subject.

Keywords: Behavior, activity budget, Loxodonta africana

Introduction The average adult African Elephant consumes approximately 136Kg (300 pounds) of food every single day (Cohn, 1990). The activity budget shows how many times in a specified amount of time that a certain behavior was displayed. In our activity budget the behavior with the highest percentage was eating.

Materials and Methods On Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 1350 hours we conducted our study of the behavior of Loxodonta africana for a half hour in the cafeteria at Alverno College. A condition that affected the results of our experiment was the time constraint. We used an Acer netbook and the Alverno College 1

wireless network to view the African elephants on the San Diego Zoo animal cam website. Then using Excel 2010 we recorded our data that we had collected and then using the pie chart function graphed the activity budget of the elephant.

Results Our results show that the highest amount of time is spent eating (28%). Other actions follow closely behind with walking taking up 22% of the elephants activity budget and waving ears followed that with 19%.

Figure 1. Activity budget of the African Elephant (Loxodonta Africana)

Discussion Our data can help us clue into what are important activities for the African elephant. It is possible to use this data to help with the care of the animal you do the activity budget on. If an animal is sick you may notice a decrease in the time spent eating. The activity budget also can be used in the study of the African elephant or any other species you make a budget for, like with the African elephant the other high percentage activities may be due to some instinct or physiological need and that may be why these actions are done more often. A limitation we had was that the camera was not in our control so if it moved away from our focus subject we couldnt do anything about it. Another limitation is that we were budgeting everything we saw and there are some of the activities we recorded that overlapped with other activities so we werent sure how to record it, having more knowledge in this area of data collection could help us focus more on what we should be recording.

LITERATURE CITED

Cohn, J. P. (1990). Elephants: remarkable and endangered . BioScience, 40(1), 11-14. Retrieved October 3, 2011 from Article Stable URL: http://0www.jstor.org.topcat.switchinc.org/stable/1311233