Melody Fulmer

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Toms, Christina

Area of Concentration

Animal Wellbeing and Conservation

Abstract

American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) are large reptiles living in marshy areas and are mostly active at night. Though being active at night is a natural behavior for them, alligators in human care will tend to adjust to their keepers schedule when getting fed and offered enrichment during the day. The goal for this project was to find an enrichment for an alligator in human care and help encourage her to become more active at night as a means to increase her wellbeing in human care. I tested the hypothesis that she will find multi-sensory enrichment more engaging over single sensory enrichment because it allows her to use more than one sense, therefore predicting that engaging with multi-sensory enrichment will increase her activity. An ethogram was used to observe Rose’s behavior and measure her activity overnight through security camera footage in three phases: (1) without any enrichment; (2) a pilot to record activity responses to different kinds of single sensory and multi-sensory enrichment already available; and (3) a final phase to create new enrichment and observe Rose’s behavioral and activity response with the new enrichment. The results supported my hypothesis leading to increasing Rose’s activity overnight which will improve her wellbeing in human care.

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