Study Finds Wildlife Eco-Tourism Has a Dark Side Katharine Gammon - TakePart
go to original December 12, 2016

King penguins pose for tourists in Gold Harbor, South Georgia, Antarctica (Ralph Lee Hopkins/Getty Images)

Put down that camera - ecotourism could be making wildlife less wild.

Protected areas receive more than 8 billion visitors per year, and wildlife tourism grew 30 percent between 1998 and 2008. A study has found that all that interaction between humans and wildlife poses dangers for animals.

“We know, for example, that when you put a hiking trail in an area, you start losing wildlife - but we didn’t know how and why that happens,” said Dan Blumstein, a behavioral and conservation biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coauthor of the study. “Animals are pretty smart in terms of their anti-predator behavior, but we were able to come up with a framework linking domestication with what happens during tourists visits to a natural area.”

In some cases, guides will explicitly habituate animals so that visitors can get closer to them, as happens in parks in Uganda where tourists come to watch chimpanzees.

The presence of people also pushes out predators. This so-called human shield protects wildlife from their normal predators but leaves them less vigilant about defending themselves.

Researchers, for instance, watched the distance at which the animals would start to flee in the face of danger. Rural squirrels fled at almost seven times the distance of urban squirrels.

Another study found that urban birds species wriggled, pecked, and bit less than rural individuals when removed from mist nets, suggesting city birds exhibit more relaxed behavior than their country counterparts.

Read the rest at TakePart

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