There’s a lot of hustle and bustle in the neighborhood as we prepare for our new neighbors, endangered iguanas. While everyone is looking forward to their arrival, the building still needs to be built before the iguanas can move into their new home sweet home! It’s about time for an upgrade from their current home, which was built in the late 1980s.

The new Iguana Barn will allow us to learn more about Cyclura reptile breeding and behavior, providing information useful in protecting such interesting reptiles. While the iguanas will be well-mannered, quiet neighbors, the construction of their house is causing a bit of ruckus. Quint and Quando, also known as the “Q boys,” are two cheetah brothers currently living near the construction site. The boys are used to peace and quiet, so how will they respond to this noise?

Since we can’t just ask the “Q boys” if tractors and concrete mixers don’t fit their fancy, I’ll have to investigate this question via other means. My name is Ria Boner, and I am interested in how our surrounding world can affect our bodies and actions. I studied biological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and learned a lot about animal behavior and biology. As a recent graduate, I am very excited to use what I have learned during the summer internship program with the San Diego Zoo’s Behavioral Biology Division. Did you know that when you get stressed or scared, certain chemical hormones are released in your body? These hormones then help your body respond to the world around you, including those stressful events. We don’t want to stress the cheetahs, so we actually collect little cheetah presents left in the giant kitty litter box and can take them to the lab to figure out how many stress hormones these cats produce. We can also observe what the cheetahs are doing during the construction to see if their behavior changes depending on how loud their neighborhood gets. Cheetah behavior is a lot different from the bonobos that I studied here before, but it’s fun to see that sometimes these big cats act a lot like my kitty at home!

By learning what causes stress in cheetahs, we can improve our animal care to make sure our cheetahs continue being happy cats here at the Wild Animal Park. Quint and Quando will be part of our breeding program this summer as well, so we want them to be stress-free fathers-to-be. Check back later in the summer for updates. I’ll be at the Zoo’s hormone lab, the cheetah breeding facility, and near the cheetahs you see on the Journey into Africa tour, so maybe I’ll see you when you visit the Wild Animal Park!!

Ria Boner is a CRES Neeper Summer Intern in the San Diego Zoo’s Behavioral Biology Division.

Read a blog by another CRES intern studying cheetahs…

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