Conservation (copy from Linnéa)

Ways behaviour can be used as a conservation tool

Behavioural biology has many applications to conservations. Key areas include:

• Habitat selection

• Reproductive behaviour

• Foraging

• Anti-predator behaviour

• Species interactions

• Foraging behaviour

How Tinbergen’s Four Questions Matter for Conservation

• Causation

  • Allows targeted intervention by removing the trigger or using it to attract/deter animals.

  • Proximate knowledge is the entry point for practical management.

  • e.g. understanding what triggers dispersal allows better corridor placement.

• Development

  • Is the behaviour innate, learned, or experience-dependent?

  • Critical for reintroduction as captive-bred animals often lack key learned behaviours.

  • Diagnosing behavioural deficits requires developmental knowledge.

  • e.g. animals must learn predator recognition.

• Function

  • Predicts outcomes based on the adaptive value of a behaviour.

  • Can be used to predict consequences when behaviour is disrupted.

  • Functional understanding allows prediction, not just description.

  • E.g. if mate-choice behaviour is disrupted, reproductive failure follows.

• Evolution

  • Which species can adapt to rapid environmental change?

  • Behaviourally flexible species survive — inflexible specialists are at a higher risk

  • Evaluating outcomes requires evolutionary context.

  • e.g. evolutionary history of habitat selection predicts response to fragmentation

Discuss the gap between conservation research and application

• Awareness does not translate into applicable management tools

• Solution-focused papers only represented 33% of all behaviour-conservation intersections

• Potential reasons for the gap

  • Behavioural research is often species-specific

  • Is the behaviour applicable to conservation problem-solving?

  • Behavioural studies rarely include management recommendations

  • Poor communication between researchers and conservation managers

Priority conservation research questions

• Habitat Loss & Fragmentation & Sensory Pollution

  • How does the landscape impede or facilitate animal movement?

  • Behavioural traits determine whether animals can colonize habitat patches or tolerate edge effects

  • Sensory pollution disrupts critical behaviours including signal transmission, predation risk assessment, habitat quality assessment, migration

  • e.g. turtle babies that follow moonlight to the ocean — light pollution could make them go the wrong way and DIE (not ideal)

• Human-Wildlife Conflict

  • Species must adapt to urbanization and human disturbance

  • How can we use learning theory to improve aversive conditioning in the wild to train animals to avoid people, livestock, or infrastructure.

  • How can knowledge about social relationships and information transmission be used to reduce the acquisition and spread of “problem” behaviours?

  • Behavioural research can be used as a management tool to halt the spread of invasive species and mitigate human-wildlife conflict.

• Disease & Invasive Species

• Habitat Degradation

• Conservation Breeding & Translocation

  • Most breeding decisions are made through genetic management

  • Understanding mate choice can have major effects on the productivity of breeding programmes

  • Are certain behavioural types more likely to survive translocation?

• Cross-cutting themes

Translocation

Relocating animals from one site to another to create, re-establish, or supplement wild populations for the purposes of conservation.

• Reintroduction is a restorative translocation where a species is released back into the wild in a habitat it used to be native in but has since gone extinct

• Many translocation efforts do not succeed

• Mortality is highest in the first day to a couple of weeks as animals decide where to settle and travel through unfamiliar areas in search of resources

Solitary animals? Alone?

• Solitary territorial species may benefit from stable social relationships with established neighbours during translocation.

• Species considered 'asocial' still invest in neighbour relationships — disrupting these distracts from fitness-enhancing behaviour.

Bycatch

Unintentional entanglement in fishing gear.

• significant threat to marine mammals. nets used by commercial fishing is a pronounced threat

Landscape of fear

Behavioural change driven by perceived predation risk.

• (e.g. prey avoid predator territories, kill-sites, travel corridors etc)

• cannot be replicated by human hunters due to not being present in the area in the same way as predators are

• e.g. when wolves are present, deer may retreat from fields to wooded areas which limits crop damage to farmers.