Lecture 2: The Importance Of Animal Behaviour

Question 1

What is Reproductive Success?

Answer 1

• Lifetime Reproductive Success (LRS): number of an individuals offspring surviving to maturation (not just ones born, have to pass on their genes)
• Traits that increase LRS = adaptations or adaptive traits

Question 2

Measuring Reproductive Success

Answer 2

• Difficult to measure total number of surviving offspring over lifetime, e.g. in elephants would need 150 years or more of data.
• Instead people use:
  1. Copulation rate
  2. Production of fertilised eggs/newborns
  3. Independent offspring
  4. RS over one breeding season (assume a trait linked to high breeding success in that season is also linked to high lifetime RS)
  5. Chances of survival (e.g. anti predator behaviours)
  6. Access to food (influence RS)

Question 3

Key behavioural concepts: Behavioural flexibility and personalities

Answer 3

• Many behaviours change with the physical/ social environment.
• e.g. pup care in banded mongooses. Different individuals contribute different amounts to pup care. Breeding females contribute more than non breeding females. Amount of effort put into pup care also depends on rainfall, when there hasn’t been much rainfall the non breeding females do not contribute much as there’s not much food around so focus on surviving, whilst the breeding females put in more effort, when theres lots of food around the non breeding females also contribute to helping.
• Substantial individual consistency in many behaviours, e.g. some banded mongoose have ‘helpful’ personalities.
• Personality can be important in conservation settings e.g. boldness & habituation (whether they get used to human presence) in captive breeding & human-wildlife conflict.

Question 4

Key behavioural concepts: Learning and training

Answer 4

Training takes advantage of natural learning process:
Stimulus > Response
Can be used to mitigate human-wildlife conflict.
Can use training to avoid certain locations or food-types e.g. bait human food with chilli, loud noises can deter from specific locations.

Question 5

Key behavioural concepts: Training

Answer 5

Can be used to:
1. Protect crops and farmed animals from wild animals e.g. Livestock guardian dogs
2. Locate animals of conservation concern e.g. dogs trained to detect faeces from specific animals or can be used for in-situ conservation in the field and to detect illegal wildlife tracking.

Question 6

Anthropogenic impacts on behaviour

Answer 6

1. Direct human disturbances (e.g. over-harvesting (changes numbers of them but can change age composition e.g. the African elephant being hunted, hunters tended to go for the biggest with the biggest tusks so removing the older generation with the most ecological knowledge so know where H2O sources are & food), nuisance disturbance (road traffic noise), habitat fragmentation)
2. Indirect disturbances (e.g. changes in community structure e.g. invasive species)

• In human altered environment, the fitness values of existing behaviours change. E.g. nocturnal navigation using light (moon/stars) is now hampered by modern lighting. Can be major problem if behaviours are inflexible.
• Even if behaviour is flexible, changing it can have other consequences for individual, species or ecological community. E.g. timing of reproduction in caterpillars has responded to climate change, but the same trait in great tits has not changed (may be using day length to trigger reproduction for example), led to mis-timing of reproduction.

Question 7

Behaviour-based management

Answer 7

1. Behavioural-sensitive management: incorporate behaviour into conservation decision-making, protocols & management plans. E.g. reserve design, corridor planning, wildlife epidemiology, reintroductions, translocations, population management, control of invasive species.
2. Behavioural modifications: change the behaviour of a target population. Applied where the behaviour itself is of conservation concern. E.g. training captive bred individuals pre-release, teaching wild animals to use overpasses.

Question 8

Behavioural Indicators

Answer 8

Used to:
1. Detect anthropogenic threats
2. Monitor conservation intervention success

E.g. monitoring elephant behaviour in response to tourist numbers. Some circumstances tourism made the elephants aggressive towards each other but sometimes it didn’t make a difference to behaviour.

Question 9

Framework

Answer 9

• Anthropogenic impacts on animal behaviour.
• Can use behavioural indicators to reveal those impacts that we might not otherwise realise are there.
• Can use behaviour based-management to try mediate some of the anthropogenic impacts. E.g. of Behavioural-sensitive management, an aerial walk way for slow loris’, they hate walking along the ground so if going to try to encourage them to move between different areas of fragmented forest need to put aerial walkways.
• Behavioural modification can be used too.
• Behavioural indicators can also be used to monitor management projects (monitor the success of behaviour-based management)