Think like an animal: Understanding animal decision making for conservation

Animals make decisions about risks and rewards based on their environmental and social context. That context is changing as humans are altering natural systems at an unprecedented rate. We are causing habitat degradation, fragmentation, and loss, and are directly impacting species populations. These changes influence animal decision making behaviors such as mate searching, foraging, avoiding predators, and finding shelter. And the resulting impacts affect individual fitness and potentially cause a decline in species populations. It is, therefore, vital to understand animal decision making (ADM) to predict how animal populations will respond to these changes. Researchers have observed links between anthropogenic, or human-caused, changes and impacts on animal species. But they have made less effort to explicitly consider how animal decision making creates or affects this link. Decision making methods that may have helped animals be well-suited to their natural conditions may, in this human-altered modern environment, actually hurt their survival.

In a recent paper published in Integrative Zoology, Megan A. Owen and her colleagues from the San Diego Zoo and UCLA investigated the different mechanisms of animal decision-making. To make ADM research applicable for wildlife conservation, they determined that an multidisciplinary approach is needed. Research also needs to take changing context and different stages of decision-making into account. Using such an approach can help researchers identify the decision-making and life cycle stages most impacted by human activity. This would help conservationists prevent some of those negative impacts.

The researchers described two ADM strategies that show how human impacts can affect animal behavior. The first is called a threshold-based strategy. This occurs when an animal will only select a mate or resource if it is of a certain quality, for example, a desired size. Comparative valuation, on the other hand, is when animals compare their options and choose the best one. Female sperm whales use a threshold-based strategy to choose a mate – they want males above a certain body size. However, because humans are hunting mostly large male whales, they have become rare in the southeast Pacific especially. As a result, females have a harder time finding a suitable mate –  they keep passing up the smaller males in search of the now-rare large ones – which leads to fewer pregnancies. On the other hand, a different animal using a comparative valuation strategy would simply evaluate a few options and then choose the best of them, making a decision more quickly. However, a downside of this strategy could be that they settle too soon for a mate that is not strong enough. Their offspring would then be weaker, with less of a competitive advantage. Therefore, both of these ADM strategies can be beneficial or harmful depending on the context. Overall, the researchers clearly make the point that it is important to know which species use what ADM strategies. Based on this understanding, researchers and conservation can better predict the effects of human impacts and choose conservation approaches accordingly.

The researchers also looked at previous studies and identified the lack of cooperation between disciplines. Many fields, have studied ADM from their respective viewpoints such as sensory ecology, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology. However, they have done so in very discipline-specific ways that has prevented them from talking to each other and sharing information. The researcher argue that this has so far limited the application of ADM research to conservation.

The researchers suggested several ways conservationists could use ADM. First, conservationists can help animals make better habitat choices in altered or artificial environments by manipulating the signs animals look for. For example, burrowing animals may associate the presence of burrows with good prey availability. They may settle in a burrow thinking that is a good habitat, even if there turns out to be no prey – falling into what is called an ecological trap. Therefore, conservationists creating artificial burrows have to be sure to place them in habitats that actually do have those other resources such as food. Second, conservationists can increase the success of captive breeding by understanding the factors that drive mate choice for different species. Pairing animals that are more likely to accept each other can lead to more offspring. Third, conservationists can also boost the low success rate of translocation (moving animals to new environments) by understanding how the animals will react to their new environment. For instance, conservationists have successfully used ADM in kangaroo rat and black rhinoceros translocation. These animals take to a new environment better when translocated with familiar individuals – an example of the influence of social context. Therefore, by moving groups of animals together, conservationists had positive results in starting new populations.

Overall, the authors of this paper provide a compelling argument for the ways in which animal decision-making theory can help in conservation. Researchers can identify the most critical anthropogenic changes, understand their impacts on animal behavior, and build population models accordingly. Conservationists can also mitigate animal behaviors that, based on the altered human-impacted environment, actually endangers the animals’ own survival. They can therefore prevent species decline and create better conservation management plans that incorporate the ways in which animals understand their world.