Learning and conservation

The ability to change behavior as a consequence of experience allows animals to adjust their behavior to prevailing ecological conditions. This ability, referred to as learning, has the potential to affect all facets of an individual’s life, including how it avoids predators, how it interacts with conspecifics, with whom it mates, and where, when and on what it forages. Many learned behaviors directly affect survival, reproduction and population-level trait selection, and consequently have far-reaching consequences for conservation efforts. The effects of experience on behavior have been studied traditionally by psychologists with the aim of establishing general laws of learning valid across all species, and more recently by ethologists and behavioral ecologists who combine interest in mechanism and function. Reintroduction biologists are encouraged to make use of this important body of empirical research and to use an experimental hypothesis-driven approach to design captive breeding environments that produce animals with the best chances of post-release survival. Only in this way will research in the field of learning and conservation yield substantial benefits for reintroduction efforts.