Behavioral Adaptation of Wildlife Species in Response to Habitat Alteration and Increasing Human Activities

Abstract

In an era of expanding habitat modification and the increasing overlap of humans and wildlife habitat areas, behavioral flexibility is proving to be one of the important ways for wildlife survival in                  human-altered environments. This literature review provides information about how the behavior of wild species has adapted in response to habitat modification and human interaction by means of changes in movements, activity timings, and social behavior, and whether these behavioral adaptations compensate for the costs incurred by them due to these activities. Human disturbance has resulted in large-scale changes in the movement behaviors of animals all around the globe; most of the recorded examples are of 20 percent or more. Mammals have responded to this challenge through the use of temporal adaptations in their activity timing to avoid human contact during daytime hours. Nevertheless, the scale and direction of such behavioral adjustments are highly variable depending on the particular nature of the disturbance, its predictability, and species-specific characteristics, suggesting that behavioral plasticity is not an inherent protection from habitat modification. A specific example of a case study involving a large ungulate show that behavioral adjustment to disturbed habitat may come with a survival cost, because modification of habitat choice due to human disturbance is associated with increased vulnerability to predation. Behavioral adaptations to human disturbance are also seen in the social realm, where human disturbance affects the social behavior of group-living species in a way that may serve to either protect or exacerbate consequences for the population as a whole. Thus, we see that behavioral adaptation enables the persistence of many wildlife species in modified habitats but doesn’t eliminate their inherent fitness costs of being there.