Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Fear of predators can itself significantly reduce wildlife numbers and cause cascading effects down the food chain, as my team and I demonstrated for the first time in free-living wildlife in prior large-scale field experiments. In other experiments we demonstrated wildlife's fear of humans far exceeds even that of lions in savanna mammals in Africa, just as we showed carnivores, ungulates and marsupials in North America, Europe and Australia fear humans far more than non-human apex predators like cougars, wolves and bears; all of which accords with new worldwide surveys showing humans kill prey at much higher rates than other predators - making humans a global "super predator" to be feared above all others. We have already demonstrated this has impacts, in experiments showing that simply hearing people speaking can have landscape-level effects on the feeding behaviour and movements of large carnivores (cougars) and mesocarnivores (bobcats, opossums) alike. My team and I will now experimentally test for the first time if fear of humans can itself impact population size in large mammals (deer), and have cascading impacts on the fecundity or survival of species lower down the food chain (coyotes, shorebirds). If we find fear of humans can imperil wildlife populations this will create a clear imperative for protected area (PA) managers to determine if the fear inspired by wildlife tourists can cause these impacts. To answer this we have begun collaborating with South African National Parks to experimentally test if paramount fear of humans is all-pervasive, or lessened in the tourist hotspots in their National Parks. We will also experimentally test this in Canada, in Banff National Park. While possibly presenting a challenge for PA management, wildlife's fear of humans could be applied to provide one of the most potent and universally-effective wildlife deterrents for use in conservation. My team and I will use arrays of speakers broadcasting human playbacks to experimentally test if exploiting wildlife's fear of humans can protect, endangered rhinos by deterring them from poaching hotspots, threatened shorebirds by deterring their predators, and rare Tasmanian plants by deterring introduced deer from eating them; in respective collaborations with South African National Parks, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and Australian academics. In India, we will collaborate with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment to experimentally test how fear of humans can best be used to protect humans, by deterring attacks by tigers and Asian elephants, and so foster human-wildlife coexistence, by reducing retaliatory attacks on tigers and elephants. The benefits my research program will provide to Canada include training HQP (4 PhDs, 5 MScs; 2 BSc Honours and 4 undergrad assistants / year), and extend from fundamentally advancing our understanding of predator-prey ecology - to possibly saving people's lives.