Anthropogenic Effects and Conservation

The Human Problem Humans are causing the next great extinction wave in animals And they are doing so by drastically altering their environment.

The Human Problem And a lot of the current focus is on freshwater and marine environments – What we think of as normal in terrestrial systems is already actually a highly modified system

And this is true of oceans too The Human Problem

But these impacts are getting worse especially for ecosystem engineering species Seagrasses declining at a rate of 7% per year The Human Problem

Impacts to Ocean Environments Agriculture – Eutrophication and Chemical Residues

Industrial development and CO2 – Greenhouse effect and warming Changing species distributions Impacts to Ocean Environments

Industrial development and CO2 Impacts to Ocean Environments

Fishing Impacts to Ocean Environments

And alone many systems have redundancies that might help prevent ecosystem crashes Additive or Synergistic Impacts

But together, the impacts of these pressure overload the system and shift it to a “new normal” Nutrients

Behavioral Impacts Obviously our impacts affect the health and survival of animals – But how do they affect their behavior?

Eutrophication Behavioral Impacts

Pesticides W-water A-Acetone Control Numbers- concentration in mg/L of Carbaryl

Ocean Acidification

Over-fishing impacts Decline in predator body size affects the landscape of fear

Decline in body size affects the landscape of fear

Using Behavior for Conservation Assessing habitat preference – Selecting restoration sites or MPAs

Using Behavior for Conservation Assessing where human impacts are the least – Use Giving Up Densities Create Topographical Maps

Helping to Translocate animals Cormorants and the bay bridge Using Behavior For Conservation

Increasing Survival of Translocated animals – In social species, translocating family groups results in higher survival rates

Training hatchery reared animals – Hatchery trout trained to recognize predator odor (PO) by combining it with trout skin extract (TSE) Using Behavior For Conservation After 21 days

Using Behavior For Conservation