No, Your Eco-Vacation Is Not Actually Doing Animals Any Favors
A paper published Friday in Trends in Ecology and Evolution suggests that visitors to protected wildlife areas may be harming the local fauna, no matter how good their practices and intentions. In an analysis of 100 studies on animal behavior, researchers found evidence that animals let down their guard in environments where human activity makes predators scarce. Those behaviors could spill into interactions with poachers and natural predators—particularly at night or in the off-season, when the din of humanity abates—to potentially lethal effect.
“These animals become more blasé about everything,” says Daniel Blumstein, a study co-author and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California-Los Angeles. Beyond becoming less vigilant, they can also become more bold, he adds, as they grow accustomed to regularly filching food left out by human visitors.
The study is an initial exploration into whether wildlife in heavily trafficked, but officially “protected” areas could be experiencing behavioral changes similar to domesticated animals or those living in urban environments. Such parallels wouldn’t be surprising, given the heavy amount of human activity in these regions: protected areas now see 8 billion visits each year, Blumstein says.
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