February 5, 2016 by Justine
Smith, University Of California, Santa Cruz, The Conversation
You are wandering in the forest
where you live, thinking about what you are going to have for dinner. Among the
familiar calls of chickadees, you hear a foreign sound. You crouch in hiding,
frightened for yourself and your family. Not until nightfall does the noise
abate, allowing you to move again under the cloak of darkness. Soon you learn
that the sounds come from unfamiliar beings taking over your homeland. You
learn to live in hiding, believing that as soon as you let your guard down you
may pay the ultimate price.
This is not the premise of a
zombie apocalypse movie. It is the story of human expansion into wild places,
where the wildlife that coexists with us often lives in chronic fear of humans.
Disturbance by humans changes the
behavior of animals near towns, along roads and in areas that we use for
mining, energy development and recreation. Although conservationists are
starting to consider how the presence of humans affects the behavior of some
species, they rarely analyze how these changes in animals' behavior affects
entire ecosystems. In my research examining pumas, or mountain lions, in
California, I've found that our presence alters how they hunt for deer, which
can have a significant effect on the ecosystem overall.
Fear factor
Fear is a powerful force in
ecosystems. For decades, ecologists have acknowledged that fear can dictate
when, where, and what animals eat, what habitats they use and how they
communicate with one another. These behavioral changes in
animals are ecologically important because they can change interactions among
species. Although many animals are known to respond fearfully to their
predators, we are only beginning to understand how humans elicit the same
responses in wildlife.
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