10 - Manipulating animal behavior to ensure reintroduction success

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A key pathway through which animals interact with their surroundings is behavior. In a sense, the behavior of an animal is a mediator between the animal and its surroundings, allowing the animal the opportunity to adjust and improve its performance in an ever-changing environment. This is what makes behavior such an important part of conservation and management (Chapter 1). Since behavior is central for the adaptation of animals to their environment, ineffective or inappropriate behavior can greatly reduce animals’ fitness, cause management programs to fail and exacerbate human–wildlife conflict. It is in these cases that managers need to intervene and modify the problematic behavior in order to mitigate its conservation implications.

Natural selection has shaped animal behavior to ensure that organisms respond adaptively to their environment (Chapter 2). For animals that are flexible in their behavior, much of this adaptation is modified by learning through experience. If the environment is altered abruptly (often as a result of anthropogenic activity) the existing behavioral patterns may reduce fitness and even lead species toward extinction (e.g. ecological traps – see Chapter 4). This is especially true for captive-raised individuals. Because the environment in which an animal is raised will strongly affect its behavior as an adult, animals raised in captivity and later released into the wild may, therefore, show maladaptive behaviors if the conditions in which they were raised did not prepare them for life in the wild.

In order to successfully modify detrimental behaviors in wildlife, we must have a firm understanding of how the animal in question perceives its environment and of the learning processes underlying the behaviors it displays. Chapter 3 of this volume is dedicated to learning, while Chapter 6 centers on animals’ sensory systems and on how to use our knowledge of these systems in order to successfully manipulate animal behavior. In this chapter I will focus on the pivotal role of behavioral modifications of captive-bred animals targeted for reintroduction into the wild.

In response to rapid loss of species, worldwide captive breeding followed by reintroduction to the wild has become an increasingly common approach to species conservation (Chapter 8). In theory, captive breeding of wild animals allows for the propagation of a large number of animals because they are protected from environmental elements such as weather extremes, low food availability, predators, diseases and negative impacts from humans.