Integrating behavioral competency and post-release support for reintroduced wildlife: a shift in paradigm for rehabilitation and beyond

Grantee: Karli Rice Chudeau

Institutions: The Marine Mammal Center, University of California, Davis, United States

Grant amount: $30,000

Grant type: Seed grants

Focal species: Northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris), eastern Pacific harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardii)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Wildlife rehabilitation, animal behavior, animal welfare science

Research location: United States

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Project summary

In many cases, the process of releasing a rehabilitated or translocated animal can be traumatic and removes the animal’s agency, potentially weakening their ability to thrive in the wild. This project investigates post-release support and monitoring to improve outcomes for rehabilitated juvenile pinnipeds. Post-release support will include familiar cognitive enrichment to help released animals adjust gradually and buffer their affective state. Post-release monitoring will consider metrics such as behavioral diversity, energy expenditure (distance traveled), and body condition, and the animals’ specific behavioral profiles (e.g. foraging behavior) will be compared with those recorded from healthy, wild individuals. These metrics will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of post-release enrichment as an intervention for improving welfare outcomes. Cognitive bias tests for affective state carried out during rehabilitation and prior to release will also be considered as potential predictors of post-release welfare.

Why we funded this project

We envision a world in which people take responsibility for improving wild animals’ lives and have the knowledge they need to do so effectively. Rehabilitation is a part of that. However, there has been relatively little research on post-release outcomes for rehabilitated animals. Understanding those outcomes and identifying strategies to improve them could have significant welfare implications, especially for the treatment of juvenile animals, whose life trajectories may be powerfully affected by the rehabilitation and release process. We appreciate that this project combines post-release monitoring with both a specific intervention and pre-release tests of affective state that would not be possible in a wild context.

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Improving the welfare of wild and captive animals with integrated in-situ and ex-situ behavioural monitoring

Grantee: Sarah Richdon

Institutions: Bristol Zoological Society, United Kingdom

Grant amount: $30,000

Grant type: Seed grants

Focal species: White clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes)

Conservation status: Endangered

Disciplines: Animal welfare science, marine biology

Research location: United Kingdom

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Project summary

This project will investigate the welfare impacts of translocating captive-bred white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) into an existing wild population. Both resident and introduced individuals will be fitted with transponders and marked for behavioral monitoring. To evaluate welfare, the researchers will observe social interactions (e.g. aggressive interactions), behavioral diversity, and the animals’ use of their habitat. For example, emigration of native individuals from the focal habitat may be indicative of intraspecific competition intensified by the translocation. Body condition will also be scored as a metric of health and resource access.

Why we funded this project

We are excited to fund a project focused on the welfare of invertebrates, in this case an aquatic crustacean. The monitoring methods and some findings of this project may also be applicable to other aquatic taxa. Translocation is already a commonly used intervention in conservation, yet its welfare implications are poorly understood. By learning about these, translocation strategies could potentially be improved, and we might gain insights that could be applied to other welfare-motivated interventions.

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Integrating nonlethal field and lab assessments of wild fish welfare in the Colorado River in Grand Canyon

Grantee: Isaac Schuman

Institutions: Oregon State University, United States

Grant amount: $30,000

Grant type: Seed grants

Focal species: Flannelmouth sucker (Catostomus latipinnis), humpback chub (Gila cypha), rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Physiology, ichthyology, infectious disease

Research location: United States

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Project summary

This project will monitor the welfare of three species of fish in the Grand Canyon using a battery of metrics including body condition, gut microbiome, parasite load, and cortisol in skin mucus. The researchers will attempt to validate these as welfare indicators by testing whether they correlate with one another within individual fish, and whether they follow consistent patterns across the three focal species. Finally, they will use long-term population monitoring data to investigate potential correlations between these individual-based welfare indicators and environmental and demographic characteristics of individual study sites, such as food availability and age structure. 

Why we funded this project

We appreciate the variety of potential welfare indicators that this study will measure, and that there will be an explicit attempt to test the validity of the indicators for these particular species. It is exciting to see such a comprehensive analysis of wild fish welfare. We are also interested in the project’s comparison of individual welfare indicators to population-level demographic parameters, as better understanding those relationships could help with both identifying welfare threats from more readily available population data, and with predicting indirect impacts of welfare interventions.

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Are populations that are well-adapted to their environment less stressed than those that are not?

Grantee: Ryan S. Mohammed

Institutions: Auburn University, United States

Grant amount: $30,374

Grant type: Seed grants

Focal species: Guppy (Poecilia reticulata), jumping guabine (Anablepsoides hartii)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Physiology, ichthyology

Research location: Trinidad and Tobago, United States

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Project summary

In this project, wild-caught guppies (Poecilia reticulata) will be exposed to an apparent threat of predation by transferring water from a tank containing a common predator (pike cichlid) into their tank. The amount of water transferred from the predators’ tank will be varied to simulate a range of predator densities. Then, cortisol levels will be measured in both the tissue of guppies and the water they are kept in. These tissue and water cortisol measurements will be compared to develop a protocol for inferring the cortisol levels of fish based on non-invasive water measurements. The researchers hypothesize that the strength of the guppies’ physiological stress response (cortisol) will vary with apparent predation risk, and they intend to eventually build on this pilot study by using the developed non-invasive protocol to compare guppies from populations the are adapted to varying intensities of predation. 

Why we funded this project

This project will develop a protocol for inferring the cortisol levels of fish based on non-invasive water measurements, which should allow researchers seeking to use cortisol as a metric of physiological stress to avoid needing to kill fish in order to measure the chemical in their tissues. In terms of broader wild animal welfare theory, we also appreciate the project’s focus on the indirect effects of predator-induced fear, which are likely ubiquitous. This project is also intended as a pilot for a larger project that would investigate the impact of evolutionary adaptation to avoid predation on the stress response to the presence of predators.

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How do human activities impair the welfare of highly social fish?

Grantee: Joachim Frommen

Institutions: Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom

Grant amount: $28,960

Grant type: Seed grants

Focal species: The princess of Zambia (Neolamprologus pulcher)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Ichthyology, physiology, genetics/genomics

Research location: United Kingdom, Zambia

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Project summary

This project will investigate the welfare of a common fish species in Lake Tanganyika, the princess cichlid (Neolamprologus pulcher), as they are exposed to varying levels of human activity. Across eight populations representing a range of distances to human settlements and shipping routes, the researchers will monitor behaviors indicative of stress or aggression, and measure body condition and the brain tissue expression of five genes involved in stress physiology (glucocorticoid response pathway; crf, cyp11b, gr1, gr2, mr). These welfare indicators will be compared with specific environmental characteristics, including boat noise, water visibility (sedimentary and algal load), human fishing intensity, temperature stress, and structural complexity of the local environment.

Why we funded this project

By focusing on an established model system (cichlids), this project is able to benefit from background knowledge of the species’ ecology and behavior and proceed to more neglected welfare questions, as well as potentially engaging a ready audience of cichlid researchers. An especially interesting component of this project is its investigation of brain gene expression to potentially better understand how stress physiology relates to an animal’s subjective experience.

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Street smarts and bold behaviors: How humans and urban environments influence the welfare of wild mesocarnivores

Grantee: Lauren Stanton

Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, United States

Grant amount: $255,000

Grant type: Fellowship

Focal species: Urban canine

Conservation status: Least concern

Research location: United States

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Project summary

This project will evaluate the welfare impacts of both urban landscapes and human-wildlife conflict scenarios, focusing in particular on those of environmental contamination (e.g., pollution, anticoagulant rodenticides) and anthropogenic disturbance by assessing how they introduce poor diet and diseases that impact wild animals’ health and behavior, potentially increasing the likelihood of further conflict in a vicious cycle. The project will use a novel method to noninvasively assess and compare the behavior, cognition, and health of urban wildlife in relation to differences in environmental conditions. The study will use motion-activated infrared trail cameras to observe the behavior and evaluate the health and cognition of urban wildlife. By measuring important facets of each individual’s behavior (e.g., risk-taking), cognition (e.g., problem-solving), and health (e.g., body condition), the project will establish an individual-based assessment of welfare. The project will also provide a welfare vulnerability assessment in relation to environmental characteristics, which will facilitate modeling and predicting welfare risk according to environmental variables, as well as identifying mitigation opportunities for reducing poor-welfare urban environments. In addition to improving understanding of the drivers of welfare in urban wildlife, the project will develop and demonstrate a novel approach that can be further used to understand individual welfare and, in particular, address limitations in the current ability to assess subjective experiences by validating the use of relevant cognitive indicators.

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Quantifying the impact of sea ice coverage on the welfare of grey seal pups

Grantee: Daire Carroll

Institutions: University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Grant amount: $151,000

Grant type: Fellowship

Focal species: Grey seal (Halichoerus grypus)

Conservation status: Least concern

Research location: Sweden

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Project summary

This project will use historic necropsy assessment, including body condition indicators (size and blubber layer), cause of death, age, and parasite load, coupled with drone-based photogrammetry, to establish and validate welfare proxies. The project will subsequently establish and validate remote behavioral and body conditions in grey seals as a remote welfare assessment tool. The project will further seek to understand density-dependent welfare in relation to differences in environmental conditions by comparing cortisol levels from feces, behavior, and body condition of juvenile seals in land and ice breeding colonies at different seal densities. The combined information will be used to develop predictive models that can identify welfare risk factors and opportunities to mitigate them. Finally, the project will identify and propose opportunities to alleviate stress for juveniles during land breeding years to improve welfare. The project will demonstrate proof-of-concept for a combined population modeling and behavioral/health assessment approach that can be transferred to other species to understand risk factors for poor welfare and identify opportunities for correcting them.

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Identifying species traits underlying conservation translocation failure, to understand risk factors, help redesign procedures, and pre-emptively protect vulnerable wild animals

Grantee: Emma Mellor

Institutions: University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Grant amount: $226,987

Grant type: Fellowship

Focal species: Multi-species

Research location: United Kingdom

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Project summary

This project focuses on using survival as an indicator of welfare in relation to life history characteristics using a database of animal translocations. Traits significantly relating to successful translocation (as indicated by post-release survival) would be identified as risk or protective factors for a variety of animals. The project aims to enable inferences about welfare risk factors for species beyond the datasets available by integrating a phylogenetic approach to understanding welfare. Therefore, the project could provide valuable insights into susceptibility or life history characteristics that provide greater resilience to welfare harms and thus help characterize and prioritize sources of welfare concern in the wild. The project could directly inform translocation practices while providing insights into potential welfare interventions supporting multiple animal groups based on their life history traits. 

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Evaluating wild animal welfare in landscapes of fear at urban-wildland interfaces

Grantee: Dave Daversa

Institutions: University of California, Los Angeles, United States

Grant amount: $253,956

Grant type: Fellowship

Focal species: Western fence lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis)

Conservation status: Least concern

Research location: United States

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Project summary

This project will study a recognized but neglected area of animal welfare research, especially important for wild animals. Specifically, the project will investigate different landscapes of fear that wild animals are exposed to and their relative welfare impacts. In addition to elucidating the direct effects of fear on stress and welfare, the project aims to improve scientific understanding of potential indirect knock-on effects that fear can cause by assessing how the lifetime welfare effects of fear vary with respect to the animal’s life history strategy, as well as provide insights into some of the system-level effects.

Further, the project seeks to apply a cutting-edge approach to the study of welfare: cumulative stress across lifespans. This study’s approach (cumulative) and timespan (lifespan) are relatively novel elements for which much greater understanding is needed. The study proposes using DNA methylation to understand the aging and health of individual animals. Additional welfare indicators are always valuable to improve our ability to assess wild animals’ welfare. However, DNA methylation, if its link to welfare can be validated, holds special potential because, like telomeres and a small group of other biomarkers of biological age, it may record cumulative stress over an animal’s lifetime. Because it is DNA-based, it could be built in as a secondary objective to mainstream conservation genetics projects.

The study will combine multiple lines of evidence of welfare (behavioral, hormonal, and epigenetic) to investigate stress and welfare, and in so doing, would address important gaps in the knowledge of welfare in the wild: understanding the impact of fear on physiological stress and its impact on long-term welfare, assessing the components of the landscape leading to a fear response and resultant difference in welfare, and understanding how variation in life history strategies differentially interact with long-term welfare. The potential for indirect, interactive system-level effects is currently one of the most important unknowns impeding wild animal welfare-focused interventions. The project is ambitious but well-considered, and it is clear that Dave and his mentors have carefully designed the methods to achieve the stated objectives.

Find Dave’s other project, studying western toads, here.

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Predicting density dependence of welfare of wild animal populations based on resource access linked to habitat availability and usage

Grantee: Ross MacLeod

Institutions: Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom

Grant amount: $159,744

Grant type: Challenge grants

Focal species: House sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Conservation status: Least concern

Disciplines: Ecological modeling, population ecology, animal welfare science

Research location: United Kingdom

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Project summary

This project seeks to adapt a habitat and population model to incorporate welfare and apply it to the study of an abundant and widespread avian species, the house sparrow (Passer domesticus). The researchers propose to utilize a variety of welfare metrics to validate model assumptions, which will then allow them to test assumptions related to the welfare implications of density-dependent population dynamics.

Why we funded this project

We funded this project because it addresses our proposal request very closely and proposes to investigate a key wild animal welfare question using a modeling framework. They are also planning to address their question using an abundant avian species. The project has high potential to inform future work focused on modeling total welfare in a population (i.e., combining both individual welfare and population size), and to create a model that can be replicated in other systems.

Find Ross’ other project, studying wild birds, here.

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