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One of the more high-profile reptile care sheet style websites claims that reptiles “need the elements of their natural habitat. Each species of reptile evolved slowly over the course of literally millions of years to thrive within a very specific habitat, utilizing everything that habitat had to offer in order to maximize their chances of survival. My research has led me to conclude that re-creating the conditions of each reptile’s natural habitat (light, temperatures, humidity, shelters, plants, etc.) and supplementing that with enrichment is the key to promoting optimal physical and mental welfare for reptiles in captivity. (bolded text in the original)” I’d like to leave to the side, just for now, some of the most easily denied claims here:
Though these misunderstandings about evolution and adaptation are interesting and important, I’ll save them for another day. But I would like to press on the idea that “re-creating the conditions of each reptile’s natural habitat (light, temperatures, humidity, shelters, plants, etc.)” is the best way to think about providing for a species’ needs in captivity. I’d like to do this by contrasting the above claims with one of the more interesting journal articles I've stumbled across lately (though it is five years old at this point): ‘Utilization of Natural History Information in Evidence based Herpetoculture: A Proposed Protocol and Case Study with Hydrodynastes gigas (False Water Cobra)’. The author -- Zac Loughman -- talks about captive herp care at the most zoomed-out scale, and notes that "A review of 1980s and 1990s herpetocultural literature indicates that for many species a set husbandry norm was applied to entire taxonomic groups, becoming husbandry dogma. A spectrum from minimalist approaches of early zoos and select private hobbyists to naturalistic designs promoted by Bateman and another group of private hobbyists existed in these guides. Diversity in temperatures, food types, enclosure types, and other husbandry attributes often were lacking." Interesting how the early "naturalistic designs" genus is in the 'generic dogma' family (as it is now too, in my estimation). Lately, Loughman says, "“Care sheets” and in the last 10 years short care videos have proliferated on the internet in response to amphibian and reptile popularity, and often serve as the primary source of information for most reptile and amphibian keepers and entry level herpetoculturalists." These guidelines tend to be "monotypic and simplistic in nature”. The author asks "Should information used to develop husbandry techniques be the result of careful scientific study of amphibians and reptiles while in human care? One could argue not necessarily, given anthropogenic environments are not where the species in question evolved, and therefore they should not set the precedence for husbandry" -- i.e. "works for me" isn't the final word on care. Another option for making captive care decisions is that "husbandry attributes associated with herpetocultural practice should then be driven by observations and investigations in nature, where the species in question occurs naturally and evolved." He suggests these aspects of species' natural history outlined by George A Bartholomew be used to determine captive care practices:  From these, we can provide the most appropriate enclosure type and dimensions, along with space requirements that "encourage natural behaviors"; substrate and hardscape layout; lighting; thermal gradients; seasonal cycles; etc. Those are just the most relevant (to our purposes here) examples the author listed, but there are a bunch more details that are specifically and centrally interesting to the care of certain species, for example captive sex ratios.
So far this all might sound a bit similar to the idea that “re-creating the conditions of each reptile’s natural habitat (light, temperatures, humidity, shelters, plants, etc.)” is the best way to approach care. But importantly, Loughman he doesn't just recommend looking to, for example, the temperatures in a species' natural habitat but instead appeals to that species' "thermal needs" (which may be different than the particular air temp of its natural habitat). Similarly "water needs" as opposed to whether water happens to be present in the species' natural habitat. Further, he considers many aspects of a species that aren’t simply elements of its natural habitat, such as their reproductive behaviors (fecundity and parity) and changes in habitat needs over the course of its life (ontogenic shifts in ecology). These aspects of a species have important implications for its captive care but are not a matter of simply recreating its natural habitat. Loughman gives a range of criteria on which a husbandry protocol might be judged, and it is all pretty familiar stuff but well worth mentioning: "neonate/juvenile growth, stable weights in adults, behavioral responses to their environment", and on the negative side "lack of activity, specifically typical thermoregulatory, stylized inter-individual, and lack of foraging and hydration behaviors". Basically: if they grow well and act in ways that we'd expect from their wild counterparts, that's a good sign. One interesting reminder he makes on this matter is that "understanding what constitute(s) “normal” behavior is both a byproduct of research and experiences with the species in question”, which suggests that making care recommendations after (merely) online or similar “research” is not sufficient in the absence of experience with the species in question. That is to say, if you haven’t kept a species, you likely don’t know what to look for in evaluating the effects of care on it. As an illustration, one example in which both these elements (research and experience) play a role in interpreting behavior is ‘digging’ behavior in captivity: keepers might note that a species digs frequently in certain captive conditions and too often simply take that to indicate that the species is “fossorial”, when in fact this is often an artifact of captivity and so not necessarily best accommodated with deeper substrate, but rather by figuring out why the animal is acting so oddly (an animal that is 'fossorial' has physical adaptations for digging, and also uses those adaptive traits to dig). Do yourself and your animals a favor, and read Loughman’s paper to get a first hand account of it. Then, rather than depending on the recommendations of armchair experts, seek out experienced keepers of the species you’re considering caring for — and ideally these keepers would have experience keeping and breeding the species, since aspects of reproductive biology matter even to animals that are kept only as pets and never bred — to get advice based on first hand knowledge. Then integrate that advice with facts you find from a deep dive into what’s known about the natural history of the species in journal articles (not whatever comes up on a general web search). https://reptifiles.com/about/ https://scholar.google.com/ Utilization of Natural History Information in Evidence based Herpetoculture: A Proposed Protocol and Case Study with Hydrodynastes gigas (False Water Cobra), Zachary J. Loughman, Animals 2020, 10(11), 2021; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10112021 Wollenberg Valero KC, Marshall JC, Bastiaans E, Caccone A, Camargo A, Morando M, Niemiller ML, Pabijan M, Russello MA, Sinervo B, et al. Patterns, Mechanisms and Genetics of Speciation in Reptiles and Amphibians. Genes. 2019; 10(9):646. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes10090646 Comments are closed.
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