Can behavioural ecologists help establish protected areas?

Free-ranging Southern anteater mating behavior: Contribution to Tamandua natural history

Observing behavior in wild Southern Anteaters (Tamandua tetradactyla) allows Xenarthran researchers to gain perspective on natural history of this neotropical scansorial species. We describe the use of the prehensile tail to facilitate copulation for a pair in southeastern Brazil, a novel observation for this species. This detailed account of mating behavior in lesser anteaters is one of very few in the literature and contributes to basic knowledge of this group.

Strategies of protected area use by Asian elephants in relation to motivational state and social affiliations

Animals' space requirements may vary according to life-history and social considerations. We observed 516 wild adult Asian elephants from both sexes, over 9 years, to investigate how life-history traits and social behavior influence protected-area (PA) use at Udawalawe National Park, Sri Lanka. Male PA-use, quantified in terms of average between-sightings-interval (BSI), was significantly influenced by the interaction of age class and motivational state (i.e. reproduction vs. foraging). Musth lengthened with age, with a median of 24.5 days for ages 21-30, 32.5 days for ages 31-40, and 45 days for those > 40. A minority (11%) used it exclusively during musth, while others used it exclusively for foraging (44%) or both (45%). Males using it in both states and older musth-only males were more likely to be seen across years. There were 16 social communities containing between 2-22 adult females. Females' BSI was significantly influenced by social ties, but this relationship was weak, because members of social communities do not necessarily disperse together, resulting in high individual variation in space-use. Inter-annual variability in sightings among individuals of both sexes indicates that around ¾ of the population is likely non-residential across years, challenging the prevailing fortress-conservation paradigm of wildlife management.

Conservation and Management Strategies Create Opportunities for Integrative Organismal Research

Conservation and management activities are geared toward the achievement of particular goals for a specific species, or groups of species, at the population level or higher. Conversely, organismal or functional research is typically organized by hypothesis tests or descriptive work that examines a broader theory studying individual organismal traits. Here, we outline how integrative organismal biologists might conduct mutually beneficial and meaningful research to inform or assist conservation and management biologists. We argue that studies of non-target species are very useful to both groups because non-target species can meet the goals of managers and organismal biologists alike, while also informing the other. We highlight our work on a threatened lizard species' thermal physiology, behavior, and color pattern-all of which are impacted by species management plans for sympatric, threatened, bird species. We show that management practices affect activity time, thermal adaptation, and substrate use, while also altering predation rates, crypsis, ectoparasite load, and sexual coloration in the study species. These case studies exemplify the challenges of conservation and management efforts for threatened or endangered species in that non-target species can be both positively and negatively affected by those efforts. Yet, the collaboration of organismal biologists with conservation and management efforts provides a productive system for mutually informative research.

Applied Functional Biology: Linking Ecological Morphology to Conservation and Management

Many researchers work at the interface of organisms and environment. Too often, the insights that organismal, or functional, biologists can bring to the understanding of natural history, ecology, and conservation of species are overlooked. Likewise, natural resource managers are frequently focused on the management of populations and communities, while ignoring key functional traits that might explain variation in abundance and shifts in species composition at these ecological levels. Our intention for this symposium is two-fold: (1) to bring to light current and future research in functional and ecological morphology applicable to concerns and goals of wildlife management and conservation and (2) to show how such studies can result in measurable benchmarks useful to regulatory agencies. Symposium topics reveal past, present, and future collaborations between functional morphologists/biomechanists and conservation/wildlife biologists. During the SICB 2020 Annual Meeting, symposium participants demonstrated how data gathered to address fundamental questions regarding the causes and consequences of organismal form and function can also help address issues of conservation and wildlife management. Here we review how these, and other, studies of functional morphology, biomechanics, ecological development morphology and performance can inform wildlife conservation and management, principally by identifying candidate functional traits that have clear fitness consequences and population level implications.

Behavioural valuation of landscapes using movement data

Wildlife tracking is one of the most frequently employed approaches to monitor and study wildlife populations. To date, the application of tracking data to applied objectives has focused largely on the intensity of use by an animal in a location or the type of habitat. While this has provided valuable insights and advanced spatial wildlife management, such interpretation of tracking data does not capture the complexity of spatio-temporal processes inherent to animal behaviour and represented in the movement path. Here, we discuss current and emerging approaches to estimate the behavioural value of spatial locations using movement data, focusing on the nexus of conservation behaviour and movement ecology that can amplify the application of animal tracking research to contemporary conservation challenges. We highlight the importance of applying behavioural ecological approaches to the analysis of tracking data and discuss the utility of comparative approaches, optimization theory and economic valuation to gain understanding of movement strategies and gauge population-level processes. First, we discuss innovations in the most fundamental movement-based valuation of landscapes, the intensity of use of a location, namely dissecting temporal dynamics in and means by which to weight the intensity of use. We then expand our discussion to three less common currencies for behavioural valuation of landscapes, namely the assessment of the functional (i.e. what an individual is doing at a location), structural (i.e. how a location relates to use of the broader landscape) and fitness (i.e. the return from using a location) value of a location. Strengthening the behavioural theoretical underpinnings of movement ecology research promises to provide a deeper, mechanistic understanding of animal movement that can lead to unprecedented insights into the interaction between landscapes and animal behaviour and advance the application of movement research to conservation challenges. This article is part of the theme issue 'Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation'.

Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation

The impact of environmental change on the reproduction and survival of wildlife is often behaviourally mediated, placing behavioural ecology in a central position to quantify population- and community-level consequences of anthropogenic threats to biodiversity. This theme issue demonstrates how recent conceptual and methodological advances in the discipline are applied to inform conservation. The issue highlights how the focus in behavioural ecology on understanding variation in behaviour between individuals, rather than just measuring the population mean, is critical to explaining demographic stochasticity and thereby reducing fuzziness of population models. The contributions also show the importance of knowing the mechanisms by which behaviour is achieved, i.e. the role of learning, reasoning and instincts, in order to understand how behaviours change in human-modified environments, where their function is less likely to be adaptive. More recent work has thus abandoned the 'adaptationist' paradigm of early behavioural ecology and increasingly measures evolutionary processes directly by quantifying selection gradients and phenotypic plasticity. To support quantitative predictions at the population and community levels, a rich arsenal of modelling techniques has developed, and interdisciplinary approaches show promising prospects for predicting the effectiveness of alternative management options, with the social sciences, movement ecology and epidemiology particularly pertinent. The theme issue furthermore explores the relevance of behaviour for global threat assessment, and practical advice is given as to how behavioural ecologists can augment their conservation impact by carefully selecting and promoting their study systems, and increasing their engagement with local communities, natural resource managers and policy-makers. Its aim to uncover the nuts and bolts of how natural systems work positions behavioural ecology squarely in the heart of conservation biology, where its perspective offers an all-important complement to more descriptive 'big-picture' approaches to priority setting. This article is part of the theme issue 'Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation'.