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

Abstract

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 to evaluate the potential negative effects on behavioural structure induced by captive rearing and an unfamiliarity to the release-site environment in future conservation studies. We suggest several specific measures that may help to reform appropriate behavioural structures during captive rearing to form part of future feasibility and pre-release stages of conservation translocations.

Keywords

• Conservation translocation
• Animal personality
• Behavioural plasticity
• Behavioural syndrome
• Captive-rearing
• Rewilding