Wild Animal Initiative awards $500k for wild animal welfare research
March 21, 2022
Wild Animal Initiative is pleased to announce its first round of grants to research teams investigating important and neglected aspects of wild animal welfare.
Grantmaking is one of the ways Wild Animal Initiative supports the growing field of wild animal welfare research, which aims to identify ways to reduce wild animal suffering from both human and natural causes. In 2021, we launched our inaugural call for research proposals on the theme of juvenile welfare and ecology. The majority of animals born in the wild die before adulthood. This makes early-life experiences disproportionately important to estimating the welfare of a population or community. Yet this life stage is often poorly understood, in part because the juveniles and adults of many species have different diets, habitats, and even body forms.
We were pleased to receive 297 expressions of interest. We invited 50 to submit full proposals, from which 14 projects were selected to receive full or partial funding.
Below are summaries of the seven projects we are funding in full. Additional proposals will receive partial funding to support the elements of the projects that are most relevant to wild animal welfare, and another set of projects will be supported through our new fellowship program, set to launch later this spring. Details about the partially funded projects and the fellowship program will be released soon.
“Tracking how environment affects the welfare of young aquatic salamanders across their lifetimes”
Thomas M. Luhring (Wichita State University), Caitlin Gabor (Texas State University), Christopher Schalk (Stephen F. Austin State University); United States
Grant: $162,604
Sirens are a relatively unknown taxon of salamanders, resulting in the neglect of their welfare as a research area, but they have great potential to provide valuable data for welfare research. This project will repeatedly and non-invasively sample hormones from individual sirens (Siren intermedia) to determine whether individuals from some populations are physiologically stressed over their lifetime in response to seasonal and climatic variation along with measuring additional health-related information.
Why we’re funding this project:
Juvenile sirens are the focus of this study because they are particularly vulnerable and because juveniles are so abundant among amphibians. Sirens’ needs change throughout their lives, and therefore it is plausible that their welfare does as well. This project will apply a novel, non-invasive approach to measure the physiological stress of sirens and how it changes as they develop.
“Developing a method to measure wild insect health and frailty”
Jelle Boonekamp, Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
Grant: $63,536
The physiology of model insect species has been studied extensively in the lab, but data about insects’ health and well-being in nature is scarce. To lessen that knowledge gap, this project aims to develop a system for measuring the frailty of insects, with field crickets (Gryllus campestris) as the model species. Future research might seek to determine the relationship between frailty and welfare, and this project addresses the need for a frailty index assessment tool.
Why we’re funding this project:
In order to improve welfare for invertebrates, we first need to understand how to measure their welfare. Although we still know little about insect minds, physical health is an important component of welfare. This project will develop a model to evaluate the health of individual wild insects.
“Estimating the impacts of farmland management on invertebrate welfare”
Ruth Feber, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Grant: $58,448
This study will adapt the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) methodology to explore how agricultural activities affect the welfare of wild invertebrates, using lepidopteran larvae (caterpillars) as a model group.
Why we’re funding this project:
Farms take up nearly half of the world’s habitable land, but there is a lack of data about how agricultural management practices might impact wild animals, especially invertebrates. In order to improve welfare for invertebrates, we first need to understand how to measure welfare. This project will explore a model to quantify wild insect health and wellbeing.
“Investigating sentience and emotional states in wild octopuses”
Michaella Pereira Andrade, Federal University of ABC, Brazil
Grant: $37,959
It is now more widely accepted than ever before that cephalopods (octopuses, squids, and nautiluses) exhibit sentience. But it is still uncertain how their sentience evolved, and how it is characterized. In this project, researchers will observe juvenile octopuses (Octopus insularis) in a natural nursery to evaluate the relationship of their behavior, personalities, ecological interactions, and expressions of emotion. They will also analyze published data to estimate when octopus sentience may have evolved and when, between birth and adulthood, individuals develop sentience.
Why we’re funding this project:
We care about animals’ welfare in proportion to their capacity to experience welfare, which is to say, their sentience. Understanding which animals are sentient and at which developmental stages is therefore foundational to our work. This project is especially interesting because it will teach us a lot about what the lives of juvenile octopus are like and the extent to which welfare impacts are mediated by personality traits.
“Using thermal imaging to study early life stress in birds”
Paul Jerem, Tufts University, United States
Grant: $37,780
Animal stress responses evolved to increase survival by stimulating behaviors that reduce exposure to challenging situations. However, young birds who are entirely reliant on their parents are incapable of acting to change their circumstances, potentially exposing them to the damaging effects of chronic stress. Such species are known to suppress aspects of their stress physiology during development. It remains unclear if other parts of the system remain active and could serve as useful indicators for efforts to improve early life welfare. This project seeks to investigate this possibility in juvenile house sparrows (Passer domesticus) using a novel, non-invasive method for inferring internal state – thermal imaging of body surface temperatures.
Why we’re funding this project:
We want to understand juvenile welfare, but developmental changes can make it difficult to compare welfare between juveniles and adults. This project will calibrate a non-invasive proxy of welfare that can be applied to both adult and altricial juvenile birds.
“Understanding the links between welfare and wild fish survival to adulthood”
Raf Freire, Institute for Land, Water and Society, Charles Sturt University, Australia
Grant: $21,500
Many freshwater fish populations have severely declined as a result of human-caused changes in their environment. Population decline is likely to be preceded by decrease in animal welfare, so that welfare indicators could potentially serve as valuable “early warning” signals of wild animals in trouble. This study will examine how differences in water quality and the presence of potential predators affect a behavioral indicator of welfare — judgment bias — in juvenile Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii). In the future, data about how juvenile fish respond to these factors could guide interventions for helping juvenile fish survive to adulthood in the wild.
Why we’re funding this project:
The vast majority of wild fish do not survive to adulthood, but little is known about their welfare as juveniles and how that might affect their survival. This project will address that by investigating the effects of multiple aspects of habitat quality on the affective state of juvenile Murray cod.
“Evaluating how injury and illness impact individual welfare and survival in wild birds”
Katie LaBarbera, San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, United States
Grant: $20,000
Wildlife rescue centers are crucial for helping injured birds recover. Rescue professionals must decide whether each rehabilitated bird is likely to survive, and what level of welfare they will experience if they are released back into the wild. In this project, researchers will analyze an existing, long-term banding dataset with the goal of improving the strategies used by wildlife rescues and bird banders to enhance post-release welfare, and in the process, learn about how injuries affect the lifetime welfare of wild birds.
Why we’re funding this project:
With thousands of wild animal rehabilitation centers in the US alone, this study could provide information that would allow wild animal rehab staff to make data-driven decisions about their bird patients. This project also advances one of our core goals — understanding what wild animals’ lives are like — using an existing and humanely acquired dataset.
These grants were made possible thanks to the generous support of Open Philanthropy. To discuss how your gift or grant could continue to advance wild animal welfare science, please contact Interim Executive Director Cameron Meyer Shorb.