Behavioural ecology and marine conservation: A bridge over troubled water?

Abstract

Behavioural ecology is an evolutionary-based discipline that attempts to predict how animals will behave in a given set of environmental circumstances and how those behavioural decisions will impact population growth and community structure. Given the rapidly changing state of the ocean environment it seems that this approach should be a beneficial tool for marine conservation, but its promise has not been fully realized. Since many conservation issues involve alterations to an animal's habitat, I focus on how habitat selection models developed by behavioural ecologists may be useful in thinking about these sorts of problems, and mitigating them. I then briefly consider some other potential applications of behavioural ecology to marine conservation. Finally, I emphasize that the strength of a functional approach like behavioural ecology is that it allows predictions, from first principles, of responses to environmental changes outside the range of conditions already experienced and studied, and its models may be broadly generalizable across species and ecosystems.