SERVALS

Hunting Behavior in Servals

Brief provided by Valerie Hare, Shape of Enrichment.

BACKGROUND
Servals are small spotted cats that live in savanna-like areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Their diet is varied but rodents are their most common food item. Once a serval finds a rodent, it waits for an opportunity to pounce. Servals excel at both jumping in the air (for birds) and probing underbrush or tunnels (for rodents).

Servals are well known for their use of sound to find and capture rodents. Using their ultrasonic hearing they can detect rodent vocalizations and movement underground. Their tall legs and large ears are adaptations to increase their success using this method.

GOAL
Encourage the expression of natural rodent-hunting behavior, increasing both the time spent and distance traveled, to find and obtain food in captivity.

TASK
Using audio cues that approximate the rustle of prey moving across the enclosure, devise a method to encourage the serval to adopt natural hunting postures to track “prey”. Ideally, the cat will be required to travel some distance and spend some time before succeeding.

BEHAVIOR EXAMPLES

• Serval hunting and catching rodents - https://www.arkive.org/serval/leptailurus-serval/video-08a.html
• Serval hunting and catching mole - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdoTknW8oZ0

Concept development

Everyone worked on ideas for servals. After hearing about servals from Valerie and reading the brief, teams had 25 minutes to brainstorm (we set a pomodoro).

• Multiple ways to feed inwild, so multiple methods good for captive anials as well. (Val)
• Servals have best success rate for small cats = 50%, so it's okay if they don't always succeed. (Val)
• In wild, they cache food. But in captivity, keepers often clean cages - best to do 1/4 at a time only. (Val)
• Food tunnel system - robotic rodent
• Rustling = robot + different tunnel substrate / walls, AI to travel between
• Quiet between stations = nodes + conduits for power - speakers in rocks above ground/serval-proof boxes
• Elevate enclosure - hard - lower level below ground/floor to access/change routes for bots, potentially have different hunting grounds if enclosure large enough.
• Pressure-based trigger for pouncing
• Whack-a-mole for the pounce - adjustable timing as serval improves + motion sensor - are they in the area?
• Holes in ground - serval can't see, multiple possible sources of food. Pressure plate to release food. How to control for scent?
• Bird attack - rustle at ground level because they don't scan sky, bird flies up, so tracks start outside enclosure and meat flies across on wire. Public can trigger, choice of 3, wait til serval in the area.

Presentation

Serval enclosure with hidden mouse tunnels; wires for flying bird-meat start outside and end up within jump reach.