The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species
TL;DR: It is suggested that empirical investigation of ‘nuisance’ animal cognition could reveal the cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation to anthropogenic change as well as help mitigate human–wildlife conflict.
About: This article is published in Animal Behaviour.The article was published on 2019-01-01. It has received 66 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Animal cognition & Cognition.
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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: This paper found that ravens guard caches against discovery in response to the sounds of conspecifics when a peephole is open but not when it is closed, suggesting that raven can generalize from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen.
Abstract: Recent studies purported to demonstrate that chimpanzees, monkeys and corvids possess a basic Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states like seeing to others. However, these studies remain controversial because they share a common confound: the conspecific's line of gaze, which could serve as an associative cue. Here, we show that ravens Corvus corax take into account the visual access of others, even when they cannot see a conspecific. Specifically, we find that ravens guard their caches against discovery in response to the sounds of conspecifics when a peephole is open but not when it is closed. Our results suggest that ravens can generalize from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen. These findings confirm and unite previous work, providing strong evidence that ravens are more than mere behaviour-readers.
79 citations
TL;DR: A unified social-ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services (SEEDS) is developed that advances both frameworks by explicitly acknowledging the importance of competing wildlife perspectives embedded in the social and governance contexts.
Abstract: Sustaining wildlife populations, which provide both ecosystem services and disservices, represents a worldwide conservation challenge. The ecosystem services and Ostrom's social-ecological systems frameworks have been adopted across natural and social sciences to characterize benefits from nature. Despite their generalizability, individually they do not include explicit tools for addressing the sustainable management of many wildlife populations. For instance, Ostrom's framework does not specifically address competing perspectives on wildlife, whereas the ecosystem services framework provides a limited representation of the social and governance context wherein such competing perspectives are embedded. We developed a unified social-ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services (SEEDS) that advances both frameworks by explicitly acknowledging the importance of competing wildlife perspectives embedded in the social and governance contexts. The SEEDS framework emulates the hierarchical structure of Ostrom's social-ecological systems, but adds subsystems reflecting heterogeneous stakeholder views and experiences of wildlife-based services and disservices. To facilitate operationalizing SEEDS and further broader analyses across human-wildlife systems, we devised a list of variables to describe SEEDS subsystems, such as types and level of services and disservices, cost and benefit sharing, and social participation of stakeholders. Steps to implement SEEDS involve engaging local communities and stakeholders to define the subsystems, analyze interactions and outcomes, and identify leverage points and actions to remedy unwanted outcomes. These steps connect SEEDS with other existing approaches in social-ecological research and can guide analyses across systems or within individual systems to provide new insights and management options for sustainable human-wildlife coexistence.
72 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review studies on elephants to illustrate this concept and to outline avenues for the application of research on elephant ecology, life history, behaviour and personality to the development of new, comprehensive conservation strategies that take both human and elephant behaviour into account.
Abstract: Conflict between humans and wildlife is an increasing problem worldwide due to human population growth and habitat fragmentation, with growing interest amongst scientists and conservationists in developing novel solutions towards sustainable coexistence. Current efforts to mitigate human-wildlife conflict, however, are often unbalanced; they consider immediate human-centric concerns and offer deterrents against wildlife, rather than offering solutions to the underlying problems. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of calls to action for the integration of animal behaviour, cognition and knowledge of individual variation into conservation practice. However, as elephant researchers, we have seen that most human-elephant conflict mitigation strategies employed in Asia and Africa are based on conditioning fear in elephants, or general monitoring of individual or group activities aimed at altering elephant movements, rather than understanding and providing for elephant and human needs. We see an opportunity to do more by investigating elephant behaviour, cognition and ecology at the level of the individual to prevent conflict from occurring in the first place. Here, we review studies on elephants to illustrate this concept and to outline avenues for the application of research on elephant ecology, life history, behaviour and personality to the development of new, comprehensive conservation strategies that take both human and elephant behaviour into account.
57 citations
TL;DR: A cross‐disciplinary perspective is presented that integrates human–wildlife conflict, wildlife management, and urban evolution to address how social–ecological processes drive wildlife adaptation in cities and considers how specific management strategies either promote genetic or plastic changes and how leveraging those biological inferences could help optimize management actions while minimizing conflict.
Abstract: Human-wildlife interactions, including human-wildlife conflict, are increasingly common as expanding urbanization worldwide creates more opportunities for people to encounter wildlife. Wildlife-vehicle collisions, zoonotic disease transmission, property damage, and physical attacks to people or their pets have negative consequences for both people and wildlife, underscoring the need for comprehensive strategies that mitigate and prevent conflict altogether. Management techniques often aim to deter, relocate, or remove individual organisms, all of which may present a significant selective force in both urban and nonurban systems. Management-induced selection may significantly affect the adaptive or nonadaptive evolutionary processes of urban populations, yet few studies explicate the links among conflict, wildlife management, and urban evolution. Moreover, the intensity of conflict management can vary considerably by taxon, public perception, policy, religious and cultural beliefs, and geographic region, which underscores the complexity of developing flexible tools to reduce conflict. Here, we present a cross-disciplinary perspective that integrates human-wildlife conflict, wildlife management, and urban evolution to address how social-ecological processes drive wildlife adaptation in cities. We emphasize that variance in implemented management actions shapes the strength and rate of phenotypic and evolutionary change. We also consider how specific management strategies either promote genetic or plastic changes, and how leveraging those biological inferences could help optimize management actions while minimizing conflict. Investigating human-wildlife conflict as an evolutionary phenomenon may provide insights into how conflict arises and how management plays a critical role in shaping urban wildlife phenotypes.
48 citations
Cites background from "The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species..."
...Associative learning through aversive conditioning could also bolster population-level fear, even if certain individuals have never encountered negative anthropogenic stimuli (Barrett et al., 2019)....
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...In addition, individual variation in physiology and life history traits can compound with cognition and behavioral traits to hinder the success of certain nonlethal deterrents (Barrett et al., 2019)....
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...Moreover, management optimization is itself a selective pressure; management decisions impact population abundance and demography, and deter behaviors that may exacerbate conflict with people (Barrett et al., 2019; Jørgensen et al., 2019; Swan et al., 2017)....
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...…deterrents that are successful long-term is a major challenge due to difficulty of deployment, enhanced learning, and selection for behavioral plasticity, with the latter two leading to cognitive arms races and coevolution between humans and wildlife (Barrett et al., 2019; Marzluff & Angell, 2005)....
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TL;DR: It is found that parents were riskier (i.e., foraged more frequently) with their second versus first litters, supporting the prediction that parents become increasingly habituated over time, and evidence of positive phenotypesic and cohort correlations among pup traits, implying that cohort identity contributes to the development of phenotypic syndromes in coyote pups.
Abstract: A fundamental tenet of maternal effects assumes that maternal variance over time should have discordant consequences for offspring traits across litters. Yet, seldom are parents observed across multiple reproductive bouts, with few studies considering anthropogenic disturbances as an ecological driver of maternal effects. We observed captive coyote (Canis latrans) pairs over two successive litters to determine whether among-litter differences in behavior (i.e., risk-taking) and hormones (i.e., cortisol and testosterone) corresponded with parental plasticity in habituation. Thus, we explicitly test the hypothesis that accumulating experiences of anthropogenic disturbance reduces parental fear across reproductive bouts, which should have disparate phenotypic consequences for first- and second-litter offspring. To quantify risk-taking behavior, we used foraging assays from 5-15 weeks of age with a human observer present as a proxy for human disturbance. At 5, 10, and 15 weeks of age, we collected shaved hair to quantify pup hormone levels. We then used a quantitative genetic approach to estimate heritability, repeatability, and between-trait correlations. We found that parents were riskier (i.e., foraged more frequently) with their second versus first litters, supporting our prediction that parents become increasingly habituated over time. Second-litter pups were also less risk-averse than their first-litter siblings. Heritability for all traits did not differ from zero (0.001-0.018); however, we found moderate support for repeatability in all observed traits (r = 0.085-0.421). Lastly, we found evidence of positive phenotypic and cohort correlations among pup traits, implying that cohort identity (i.e., common environment) contributes to the development of phenotypic syndromes in coyote pups. Our results suggest that parental habituation may be an ecological cue for offspring to reduce their fear response, thus emphasizing the role of parental plasticity in shaping their pups' behavioral and hormonal responses toward humans.
42 citations
References
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TL;DR: Using methods developed by population biologists, a theory of cultural evolution is proposed that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.
Abstract: How do biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors combine to change societies over the long run? Boyd and Richerson explore how genetic and cultural factors interact, under the influence of evolutionary forces, to produce the diversity we see in human cultures. Using methods developed by population biologists, they propose a theory of cultural evolution that is an original and fair-minded alternative to the sociobiology debate.
4,592 citations
"The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species..." refers background in this paper
...Animals should copy the behaviour of others when the cost of individual learning is high, or when there ismoderate predictability in the environment (Boyd & Richerson, 1985)....
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TL;DR: Structural MRIs of the brains of humans with extensive navigation experience, licensed London taxi drivers, were analyzed and compared with those of control subjects who did not drive taxis, finding a capacity for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands.
Abstract: Structural MRIs of the brains of humans with extensive navigation experience, licensed London taxi drivers, were analyzed and compared with those of control subjects who did not drive taxis. The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects. A more anterior hippocampal region was larger in control subjects than in taxi drivers. Hippocampal volume correlated with the amount of time spent as a taxi driver (positively in the posterior and negatively in the anterior hippocampus). These data are in accordance with the idea that the posterior hippocampus stores a spatial representation of the environment and can expand regionally to accommodate elaboration of this representation in people with a high dependence on navigational skills. It seems that there is a capacity for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands.
2,799 citations
"The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species..." refers background in this paper
...Spatial memory is important in navigating complex anthropogenic environments (Maguire et al., 2000), however, little is known about spatial memory and cues used by nuisance species when navigating cities....
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Book•
01 Jan 1974
2,579 citations
"The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species..." refers background in this paper
...This is unsurprising, given that basic learning mechanisms such as habituation and sensitization are ubiquitous across species (Mackintosh, 1974)....
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...and sensitization are ubiquitous across species (Mackintosh, 1974)....
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TL;DR: The biodiversity of eukaryote species and their extinction rates, distributions, and protection is reviewed, and what the future rates of species extinction will be, how well protected areas will slow extinction Rates, and how the remaining gaps in knowledge might be filled are reviewed.
Abstract: Background A principal function of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is to “perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity.” In December 2013, its second plenary session approved a program to begin a global assessment in 2015. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and five other biodiversity-related conventions have adopted IPBES as their science-policy interface, so these assessments will be important in evaluating progress toward the CBD’s Aichi Targets of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020. As a contribution toward such assessment, we review the biodiversity of eukaryote species and their extinction rates, distributions, and protection. We document what we know, how it likely differs from what we do not, and how these differences affect biodiversity statistics. Interestingly, several targets explicitly mention “known species”—a strong, if implicit, statement of incomplete knowledge. We start by asking how many species are known and how many remain undescribed. We then consider by how much human actions inflate extinction rates. Much depends on where species are, because different biomes contain different numbers of species of different susceptibilities. Biomes also suffer different levels of damage and have unequal levels of protection. How extinction rates will change depends on how and where threats expand and whether greater protection counters them. Different visualizations of species biodiversity. ( A ) The distributions of 9927 bird species. ( B ) The 4964 species with smaller than the median geographical range size. ( C ) The 1308 species assessed as threatened with a high risk of extinction by BirdLife International for the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. ( D ) The 1080 threatened species with less than the median range size. (D) provides a strong geographical focus on where local conservation actions can have the greatest global impact. Additional biodiversity maps are available at www.biodiversitymapping.org. Advances Recent studies have clarified where the most vulnerable species live, where and how humanity changes the planet, and how this drives extinctions. These data are increasingly accessible, bringing greater transparency to science and governance. Taxonomic catalogs of plants, terrestrial vertebrates, freshwater fish, and some marine taxa are sufficient to assess their status and the limitations of our knowledge. Most species are undescribed, however. The species we know best have large geographical ranges and are often common within them. Most known species have small ranges, however, and such species are typically newer discoveries. The numbers of known species with very small ranges are increasing quickly, even in well-known taxa. They are geographically concentrated and are disproportionately likely to be threatened or already extinct. We expect unknown species to share these characteristics. Current rates of extinction are about 1000 times the background rate of extinction. These are higher than previously estimated and likely still underestimated. Future rates will depend on many factors and are poised to increase. Finally, although there has been rapid progress in developing protected areas, such efforts are not ecologically representative, nor do they optimally protect biodiversity. Outlook Progress on assessing biodiversity will emerge from continued expansion of the many recently created online databases, combining them with new global data sources on changing land and ocean use and with increasingly crowdsourced data on species’ distributions. Examples of practical conservation that follow from using combined data in Colombia and Brazil can be found at www.savingspecies.org and www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3zjeJW2NVk.
2,360 citations
"The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species..." refers background in this paper
...Many species are currently in decline (Pimm et al., 2014), while others are thriving in humanaltered habitats by taking advantage of new opportunities associated with anthropogenic disturbance (Lowry, Lill, & Wong, 2013; Sol, Lapiedra, & Gonz alez-Lagos, 2013; Wong & Candolin, 2015)....
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TL;DR: This Article contains typographical errors in Table 2 where ‘Week 2 (N = 32)’ was incorrectly given as ‘week (n’=2’.
Abstract: Scientific Reports 5: Article number: 10942; published online: 01 June 2015; updated: 23 February 2016 This Article contains typographical errors in Table 2 where ‘Week 2 (N = 32)’ was incorrectly given as ‘Week (N = 2)’.
2,328 citations