Moving beyond defining animal personality traits: The importance of behavioural correlations and plasticity for conservation translocation success

作者：Xiao‐Yuan Wu, Huw Lloyd, Lü Dong, Yanyun Zhang, Nan Lyu · 发表于：Global Ecology and Conservation · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02784 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Animal Behavior and Reproduction、Wildlife Ecology and Conservation、Avian ecology and behavior

Translocations using captive-reared and wild-caught animals are important and widely used conservation tools to boost dwindling endangered populations and for maintaining biodiversity, but still suffer high failure rates. Animal personality, defined as consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour, can have a critical influence on individual fitness and population dynamics. Many conservation translocations could benefit by selecting individuals with certain personality traits, but the importance of personality of the ‘founders’ is often not considered. The link between behavioural assessments and improving translocation success therefore needs further investigation to demonstrate that adopting behavioural assays for translocations is worthwhile and feasible. Too few studies have considered the effect of captive-rearing or novel release-site conditions on changes to pre-release behavioural structural characteristics, including such as between-trait (i.e., behavioural syndromes) or within-trait correlations (i.e., personality-plasticity correlations) among individuals. Considering that appropriate behavioural structures can usually serve as immediate adaptive responses to environmental uncertainty, we suggest that the loss of appropriate structures may give a partial explanation for why captive-reared or wild-caught animals unfamiliar with the release-site environment suffer high post-release mortality rates. We call for more comprehensive personality trait assessments t...