L6 Animal Behaviour and Conservation Flashcards
What does behavioural ecology primarily focus on?
-Focused on fundamental questions
What does conservation biology focus on?
-More focused on threats to biodiversity and strategies in nature
What benefits may there be for studies combining behaviour and conservation?
-Justification of behaviour research spending
-Improved predictions of individuals responses to changing conditions
Describe conservation behaviour (combined).
-Application of knowledge of animal behaviour to solve conservation and management issues
-Relatively young, but growing field
-Focuses on conservation and management of a single species
-Use of well-designed experiments to collect data on factors important to conservation
What threats face marine species?
-Overexploitation of fisheries
-Also effects non-target species
-Coastal developments
-Thermal pollution
-Chemical pollution
What are conservation efforts like for marine species?
Poor, with exception of cetaceans
-Received less attention than conservation of terrestrial species
What is a leading branch of applied ecology?
-Fisheries research
-Largely based on life tables
-research on behaviour largely avoided to simplify analyses
What are the two potential links to conservation that behaviour might have?
-May affect the vulnerability of organisms to being killed or having some aspect of their life cycles disrupted (eg foraging behaviour
-Behaviour may play a key role in translating individual mortality into population changes (density dependent changes in reproductive behaviour may affects rates of population growth)
What is shoaling behaviour?
-Adaptative behaviour exploited by fishing industry
How can shoaling be exploited by the fishing industry?
-Entire shoals and spawning aggregations can be surrounded by nets
-High catchability may cause problems for accurate stock assessment
-Can yield profitable catches even when total population sizes are low
-May hasten species decline
