Since the Spring of 2019, I've been working with Animal Welfare Specialists at San Diego Zoo to create enriching experiences for captive animals and their wild conspecifics. During that time, I’ve developed a modular feeding system called Modupipe which provides Great Apes with behavioral opportunities that are cognitively challenging, provoke species-specific behaviors, and nurture measures of choice and control.
Modupipe is designed for zoo environments, which over the last 100 years have emerged from places of public entertainment to organizations of scientific research and conservation. In the light of current ecological transformations and the associated extensive extinction of species, zoos play a critical role in the preservation of our planet’s biodiversity.
Modupipe is based on tool-use behaviors that are natural to a variety of primates such as Orangutans, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas or Macaques. A tool-using performance in an animal is specified as the use of an external object as a functional extension of mouth or beak, hand or claw, in the attainment of an immediate goal. This goal may be related to the obtaining of food, care of the body, or repulsion of a predator.
The Modupipe system is designed to stimulate exploration and problem-solving behavior and consists of differently shaped PVC modules that are very light, inexpensive and highly resistant. The different modules can be joined together to form individual tubes of different shapes and lengths that can be freely and three-dimensionally built into animal enclosures.
