Influence of enclosure design on the behaviour and welfare of Pogona vitticeps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Complex or naturalistic enclosures have become increasingly accepted as those best-suited to improve an animal's welfare. However, designing such enclosures can be difficult if little is known about the animal in the wild, and enclosures that aim to replicate natural habitats must still be assessed to ensure their assumed benefits are realized. Therefore, this study examined the behaviour and physiology of captive-bred bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) living in naturalistic- and standard-style enclosures. First, we assessed whether naturalistic-style enclosures better accommodated a lizard's behaviour by examining if lizards in these enclosures were inactive for a similar amount of time as their wild counterparts, if they used their enclosures more evenly than standard-housed lizards, and if naturalistic enclosures provided better thermal heterogeneity than standard enclosures. Then, we examined if living in naturalistic-style enclosures improved the lizard's welfare by examining behaviours related to stress and relaxation as well as heterophil to lymphocyte (H:L) ratios. Although naturalistic enclosures did offer better thermal heterogeneity, evidence that they better accommodated a lizard's behaviour or improved their welfare was equivocal: lizards spent the majority of their day inactive, in one area of the enclosure, and performed similar amounts of behaviours related to stress and relaxation, regardless of enclosure style. Furthermore, H:L ratios were only lower for female lizards in naturalistic enclosures. Our results may have been influenced by the timeline of data collection but could also suggest that standard enclosures are sufficient for P. vitticeps, that P. vitticeps perceive standard- and naturalistic-style enclosures as similar, or that the potential benefits of naturalistic enclosures were hampered by the enclosure's size. Ultimately, it was apparent that structural complexity alone was insufficient to influence lizard welfare, highlighting the importance of considering the animal's motivations throughout their life and aspects other than enrichment for effective enclosure design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".