# An Ecological and Neural Argument for Developing Pursuit-Based Cognitive Enrichment for Sea Lions in Human Care

## TL;DR

The paper argues that sea lions in captivity need enrichment focused on their natural hunting behaviors, like chasing prey in water.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a novel approach to cognitive enrichment for sea lions based on their natural prey-pursuit behaviors.

## Key findings

- Standard enrichment methods for sea lions may not stimulate their natural cognitive abilities.
- Sea lions require water-based enrichment that mimics their natural prey-pursuit behaviors.
- Tailoring enrichment to species-specific cognitive niches could improve captive animal welfare.

## Abstract

In order to address the physical and mental needs of animals in captivity, scientists and animal care personnel have developed a number of enrichment strategies. These generally involve providing opportunities in the captive environment for the animal to engage in natural behaviors. Cognitive enrichment, that is, giving animals an opportunity to explore their environment and solve problems, is thought to ward off boredom and understimulation. The cognitive enrichment approaches used with captive sea lions and other marine mammals have tended to be similar to those developed for captive primates, even though the two groups of animals behave very differently in the wild. Here, we posit that the types of problems sea lions have to solve in the wild, for example chasing down and catching live prey, and the brains they have evolved to solve those problems, suggest a broader approach. We recommend the evaluation of enrichment built around target pursuit and flexible goal-based behavior in water.

While general enrichment strategies for captive animals attempt to elicit variable and species-typical behaviors, approaches to cognitive enrichment have been disappointingly one-size-fits-all. In this commentary, we address the potential benefit of tailoring cognitive enrichment to the “cognitive niche” of the species, with a particular focus on a reasonably well-studied marine carnivore, the sea lion. Sea lions likely share some cognitive evolutionary pressures with primates, including complex social behavior. Their foraging ecology, however, like that of many terrestrial carnivores, is based on the rapid and behaviorally flexible pursuit of avoidant prey. Unlike terrestrial carnivores, sea lions carry out this pursuit in a truly fluid three-dimensional field, computing and executing sensorimotor transformations from any solid angle to any other. The cognitive demands of flexible prey pursuit are unlikely to be fully elicited by typical stationary puzzle box style foraging enrichment devices or screen-based interactive games. With this species, we recommend exploring more water-based movement activities generally, and complex pursuit challenges specifically.