How ecotourists actually make things worse for wildlife

Sometimes it seems humans just can’t do anything right. The well-intentioned, conservation-minded people who spend millions of dollars a year on ecotourism might be making the very critters they’re trying to preserve more vulnerable to predators.

 That’s the warning from a group of ecologists working in Brazil, France and the United Staters. Writing in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, they offer a plethora of reasons why wild animals might suffer from the benign attention of humans.

 People visit protected nature areas an estimated 8 billion times a year, and they spend about US$600 billion while doing so, according to a February report in PLOS Biology. What distinguishes these trips from other types of travel is that they allow tourists to see wild places in a way that “conserves the environment, sustains the well-being of the local people, and involves interpretation and education,” according to the International Ecotourism Society.

 But there are several ways that these well-intentioned visits can backfire, the new report says.

 For instance, simply spending time around humans can lull animals into a false sense of security. Evidence for this comes from studies of “flight initiation distance”, which is a measure of how close to a threat an animal is willing to be before it tries to escape. Researchers have found that the wild animals living around people in urban areas have smaller flight initiation distances than animals living in rural areas, where humans are more scarce.

 In one experiment, urban fox squirrels allowed people to get seven times closer to them before running away compared with fox squirrels in rural areas. (Similar patterns have been observed with birds.) The foxes that were used to people also had a tamped-down response to the vocalisations of their predators, according to a 2009 study in the journal Landscape Ecology.