Chances are, you’re aware that the wildlife of the world isn’t doing too great. The climate is changing, the forests are falling, and the reefs are bleaching. Habitats are fragmented, separated and shrinking in size, and conservation efforts are wide-ranging but with little apparent success. One such solution you may have heard of: translocations. Translocation is the movement of organisms from one site to another in order to conserve the individuals in an area or to re-introduce a species to a habitat it no longer resides. A popular example of the latter would be gray wolves in Yellowstone. While translocation is a fairly popular conservation strategy, it is also highly expensive and has a history of failure. This history doesn’t have to be a bad thing, however. In fact, it is an essential feature to focus on in order to learn from our mistakes. Such thoughtful reflection is the target of a paper written by three notable researchers in the field of conservation behavior. By sifting through almost 300 case studies of animal translocation, they compile the top issues faced by researchers in the past, and how we can address these failures to maximize the future survival of species already in dire circumstances. The top three challenges encountered include: lack of funding, monitoring difficulties, and animal behavior. The harsh reality is that the wildlife and conservation community is in an ever-present fight for money, as many fields are. Since money is what makes the world go ‘round, when the funds dry up, the research stops, which brings us to the next issue of monitoring. Monitoring difficulties refers to the follow-up process of checking in on translocated individuals and assessing how they are doing in their new homes, or, more simply, if they are even alive. Finding specific animals in the wild is hard enough, now imagine trying to find the same individuals, repeatedly, and deciding whether those animals are really good at hiding or were already eaten on the first day of release. Being able to assess if the re-introduction or preservation strategy has worked is obviously essential in determining whether it’s worth doing again. These more thorough follow-ups, think camera or physical traps, even tracking devices if feasible, means a more expensive budget which also means a lower likelihood of getting approved. One way to improve the odds of finding the study participants, without getting the fancy equipment, is getting educated on their typical behaviors and using them as a predictive tool. Of course, this works best under the assumption that there’s plenty of existing research to be studied, which implies a lot of money has already been spent; a circumstance, as you could guess, that is not a common one. Furthering the difficulties is, of course, the existence and temperamentality of animal behavior itself and its inevitable connection to the animal’s success (persistent survival) after release. The field of animal behavior and the innumerable factors affecting one animal’s response to its surroundings are dizzying, but the behaviors of particular trouble are those of dispersal. Now, dispersal in this case, put simply, is the movement of animals. In the wildlife setting, it is typically the movement of juveniles away from the home they were raised in as they seek a new place to raise a family of their own, but in the case of translocation, it could simply be seen as their movement away from the release site. Issues arise in translocation programs when these animals disperse too fast, too far, or not at all. Aside from individuals being harder for humans to find when follow-up studies are conducted, it can also make it more difficult for individuals to find each other, reducing breeding possibilities and probability of survival. It can also undo any progress made with the translocation efforts, with far-dispersers simply returning back to where they were originally captured from. Additionally, individuals that venture outside of their protected habitat find themselves lacking in quality resources or at risk of being hunted. Such behaviors could be caused by a wide range of factors including poor habitat quality, or the illusion of such if the indicators they use aren’t present. For example, if you are a shorebird that strongly values the opinions and confirmation of other shorebirds, you aren’t going to stay on a seemingly abandoned slab of rock no matter how perfect of a habitat it may actually be. Essentially, if no one else is there, how good could it be? But if there’s a crowd, then it must be splendid. Along these lines, animals that don’t disperse at all are also prone to negative effects such as potentially overloading a habitat, which decreases its availability of resources, or limiting the available gene pool to only closely related (inbred) individuals. Both of these issues can be addressed by understanding what factors affect the animals’ decisions to stay or leave an area. If they are straying too far away and too quickly, the addition of food, familiar species calls, and careful site selection can help to anchor the individuals to a release site. Conversely, adding these same variables to neighboring locations can help them to disperse away from the release site. While dispersal is the most reported issue surrounding translocation research, this one aspect barely scratches the surface of the complex workings of animal behavior. Factors such as interaction/competition, either within their species or with their neighbors, ability to learn, foraging strategies, and anti-predation responses are all further behaviors that need to be learned about in order to best ensure the success of a translocated species. While the complexity may be dissuading to some, it is important to realize that the survival or extinction of a species could depend on this research, and, since the majority of our activities as humans negatively impacts and adds added pressures to these animals, isn’t it our responsibility to give them the best chance possible? For more in-depth information, check out the original article: Berger-Tal O, Blumstein DT, Swaisgood RR. 2020. Conservation translocations: a review of common difficulties and promising directions. Anim. Conserv. 23:121–31 https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/acv.12534
Hi, you are one of the authors? It is always good to see such articles on the site. I think such a compilation could do well to separate very old translocations, when conservation science did not exist. Also, many translocations failed before start (were considered but not happened) and are lost from a review. I noticed that the biggest difficulty is a group collectively named administrative / logistic. So-called animal behavior issues are specific to a species / group, need years to understand, and afterwards can still turn to be impossible to influence. However, administrative issues can theoretically be fixed quickly and for all species. I noticed that within conservation community, there is a strong culture against intervention. It is also felt by zoos, which have to fight many and often unnecessary permission hurdles to run their conservation projects in situ and ex situ.I think there is a need to educate the conservation community itself, which was raised on idealistic approach that nature will always take restore itself best.
