Experiment Ideas

ABR systems can be deployed in areas of special interest, such as at waterholes or carcasses, to understand interactions at limiting resources; they can also be paired with other methods, such as camera trap surveys, weather stations, or biologgers, to contextualize how the environment or individual condition modulates behavioral decision-making.  For some purposes, it may not matter why animals are in front of the camera, and as such, these devices could be baited or otherwise positioned in ways to maximize detection.

Some key areas for experimentation include:

• Predator / Prey Responses and Interactions
• Intraguild Interactions
• Impacts of Human Activity
• Human Wildlife Conflict
• Animal Intelligence
• Considerations

ABR systems can help understand anti-predator responses to present, historically present and reintroduced predators, and can be deployed along underlying gradients of predation risk, such as areas of high, medium, and low predator use/occupancy and across environmental features that prey associate with risk and safety. Similar experimental designs could be used to test predator responses to prey, predator / prey responses to invasive predators / prey.

Intraguild Interactions

ABRs can assess the mechanisms of competition and coexistence within trophic guilds and evaluate how loss or addition of keystone species affects intraguild interactions. ABRs could be placed at high-value resource units, such as carcasses, to establish dominant/subordinate status among competitors.

ABRs can be used to assess how species respond, negatively or positively, to human activity.

ABRs can positioned across gradients of human disturbance (e.g., in national parks, outside park boundaries, in human settlements, or in the same area during hunting and non-hunting seasons) to test whether human ‘super predators’ are attractive to prey due to mechanisms such as the ‘refuge effect’ (i.e., scaring away predators that would otherwise consume prey), or to test the impact of human presence or activities on animal behaviour and territory.

ABR systems may be used to evaluate questions that lie further in the realm of animal behavior. For example, Joyce Poole et al. have proposed using ABRs programmed with local languages and Western languages to see whether elephants can discern human dialects, as local people may pose more of a threat due to poaching than non-threatening international tourists.