Ecotourism Could Change Wild Animals' Behavior, Leaving Them Vulnerable To Predators

Who could ever predict that ecotourism would harm, rather than help conservation efforts or boost the economy?

The industry could actually harm wild animals, says the University of California, Los Angeles. It actually includes various activities that makes humans share them with marine mammals, according to HNGN.

"This massive amount of nature-based and ecotourism can be added to the long list of drivers of human-induced rapid environmental change," said Daniel Blumstein, the study's senior author and professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.

More than a 100 studies that studied the link between ecotourism and wild animals found that the behaviour of humans can influence animals, making them vulnerable to poachers and other problems.

When they warm up to humans, animals begin to relax and even become bolder when faced with threats. This tends to weaken natural predators and give the smaller animals a free range. Hence, as the studies showed, silver foxes tend to get "tamer" due to human interaction, even as domesticated fish become less threatened by predators.

"If individuals selectively habituate to humans-particularly tourists-and if invasive tourism practices enhance this habituation, we might be selecting for or creating traits or syndromes that have unintended consequences, such as increased predation risk," the researchers wrote. "Even a small human-induced perturbation could affect the behavior or population biology of a species and influence the species' function in its community."

Hence, ecotourism can actually be dangerous, say the researchers. The study has been published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.