Ecotourism May Put Wild Animals at Risk as the Business Booms

First Posted: Oct 12, 2015 12:36 PM EDT

Ecotourism may be putting animals in danger. Scientists have taken a closer look at the interactions between wild animals and ecotourists and have found that all of these interactions put animals at greater risk of being eaten.

"Recent data showed that protected areas around the globe receive 8 billion visitors per year that's like each human on Earth visited a protected area once a year, and then some!" said Daniel Blumstein, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This massive amount of nature-based and eco-tourism can be added to the long list of drivers of human-induced rapid environmental change."

The new report covers the way human presence changes the way animals act. More specifically, it looks at how these changes might spill over into other parts of animal lives. These changes can actually put animals at risk in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

"When animals interact in 'benign' ways with humans, they may let down their guard," said Daniel Blumstein, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If this boldness transfers to real predators, then they will suffer higher mortality when they encounter real predators."

Ecotourism is a bit like domestication or urbanization. In all three cases, regular interactions between people and animals may lead to habituation-a kind of taming. Evidence has shown that domesticated silver foxes actually become more docile and less fearful.

The presence of humans can also discourage natural predators, creating a safe haven for smaller animals that might make them bolder. For example, when humans are around, vervet monkeys have fewer run-ins with predatory leopards.

"If individuals selectively habituate to humans-particularly tourists-and if invasive tourism practices enhance this habituation, we might be selecting for or creating traits or syndromes that have unintended consequences, such as increased predation risks," write the researchers. "Even a small human-induced perturbation could affect the behavior or population biology of a species and influence the species' function in its community."

The findings are published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

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TagsEcotourism, Environment, Environmental, Human, Humans, Wildlife, Animal Behavior