ES51CH21_Greggor ARjats.cls August 12, 2020 11:48
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and
Systematics
The Rules of Attraction: The
Necessary Role of Animal
Cognition in Explaining
Conservation Failures
and Successes
Alison L. Greggor,
1
Oded Berger-Tal,
2
and Daniel T. Blumstein
3
1
Department of Recovery Ecology, Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo Global,
Escondido, California 92027, USA; email: agreggor@sandiegozoo.org
2
Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion 8499000, Israel;
email: bergerod@bgu.ac.il
3
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles,
California 90095, USA; email: marmots@ucla.edu
Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 2020. 51:483–503
The Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and
Systematics is online at ecolsys.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-
103212
Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
conservation behavior, habituation, learning, memory, umwelt
Abstract
Integrating knowledge and principles of animal behavior into wildlife con-
servation and management has led to some concrete successes but has failed
to improve conservation outcomes in other cases. Many conservation inter-
ventions involve attempts to either attract or repel animals, which we refer
to as approach/avoidance issues. These attempts can be reframed as issues
of manipulating the decisions animals make, which are driven by their per-
ceptual abilities and attentional biases, as well as the value animals attribute
to current stimuli and past learned experiences. These processes all fall un-
der the umbrella of animal cognition. Here, we highlight rules that emerge
when considering approach/avoidance conservation issues through the lens
of cognitive-based management. For each rule, we review relevant conserva-
tion successes and failures to better predict the conditions in which behavior
can be manipulated, and we suggest how to avoid future failures.
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