Consistency in the flight and visual orientation distances of habituated chacma baboons after an observed leopard predation. Do flight initiation distance methods always measure perceived predation risk?

Abstract

Flight initiation distance (FID) procedures are used to assess the risk perception animals have for threats (e.g., natural predators, hunters), but it is unclear whether these assessments remain meaningful if animals have habituated to certain human stimuli (e.g., researchers, tourists). Our previous work showed that habituated baboons displayed individually distinct and consistent responses to human approaches, a tolerance trait, but it is unknown if the trait is resilient to life‐threatening scenarios. If it were consistent, it would imply FIDs might measure specific human threat perception only and not generalize to other threats such as predators when animals have experienced habituation processes. We used FID procedures to compare baseline responses to the visual orientation distance, FID, and individual tolerance estimates assessed after a leopard predation on an adult male baboon (group member). All variables were consistent despite the predation event, suggesting tolerance to observers was largely unaffected by the predation and FID procedures are unlikely to be generalizable to other threats when habituation has occurred. FID approaches could be an important tool for assessing how humans influence animal behavior across a range of contexts, but careful planning is required to understand the type of stimuli presented.

Intolerant baboons avoid observer proximity, creating biased inter-individual association patterns

“…from a small plantation by local workers, usually resulting in alarm barks and fleeing responses. However, the study group appeared adept at recognising the differences between researchers and these threats 20 . The majority of the study group’s home-range typically overlapped with the core area of the Lajuma Research Centre, and as a result, interactions with staff living in the area, unfamiliar researchers, and tourists were frequent.…”

“…As such, the approach methodology is unlikely to represent a stimulus outside of the norm for our study animals. This may explain why displacement responses were so passive and why there was no evidence of habituation or sensitization effects across the group or individually through a range of temporal periods 2 or after life-threatening events 20 . As a result, our situation was possible without risk of causing stress or anxiety in the study subjects, eliciting agonistic behaviours towards observers, or interfering with their prior habituation levels.…”

Animal-friendly behavioral testing in field studies: examples from ground squirrels

“…Some species do not distinguish between human intruders and natural predators, and flight distances during tests do not differ when individuals are approached by a human compared to a predator (e.g., Asunsolo-Rivera et al, 2023 ). However, other species have nuanced responses to threats and discriminate between different levels of threat or different types of predators, and flight distances in response to human intruders can differ from those in response to actual predators ( Allan et al, 2021 ; Morelli et al, 2022 ). Thus, in studies specifically evaluating antipredator behavior, rather than temperament in general, behavioral observations of responses to predators would increase the reliability of results obtained from flight tests.…”

Towards a unified framework for studying behavioural tolerance to anthropogenic disturbance

“…in the context of nature-based tourism, see [63]). Fortunately, such transfer seems unlikely (e.g., [64,65]), mainly because tolerance, at least when acquired through habituation, appears to be specific to temporal, spatial and behavioural variables [59]. Yet, studying fear generalisation is an important topic [62] with many applied implications.…”