New black bear study finds srones cause stress

UAVs, or unnamed aerial vehicles, are perhaps one the most popular electronic devices nowadays. Drones have also tremendously boosted research efforts, particularly in wildlife preservation. An animal should be studied in its natural habitat without the animal knowing that there is a data collection device. However, drones have raised serious criticisms regarding to privacy concerns.

(Photo: JESSIE TANNER (@JESSIECTANNER)) Scientists fly a drone above a forest in Minnesota home to American black bears.

However, although carries illustrate indications of tension from their an increase in heartrate, these done rest as an alternative to just got away.

UAVs have enabled scientists and conservationists to “get up close and personal with nature”, reports The Washington Post. They can travel where humans can’t, and quickly go in and out of hard-to-reach areas. While drones can certainly make the scientific process easier and more in-depth, their unintended side effects may cause more harm than good.

Animals often appeared to take encounters with these UFOs in stride.

He found that all four bears were put under heavy psychological stress beneath the buzzing of UAVs. The finding suggests that greater caution is necessary with drones flying above wildlife. Two of the bears were females with cubs, one was a female who had entered hibernation 2 days before the first flyover and the fourth was a young male. The bears were fitted with Global Positioning System collars to monitor their movements and cardiac biologgers that measure heart rates. However the drones are creating chronic stress for the black bears and other animals. The latter monitors and records heart rate.

“Just because we can’t directly observe an effect doesn’t mean it’s not there”, Ditmer added. What is interesting, however, was that the bears’ hearts spiked, but they did not run away.

One study published earlier this year explored how birds responded to drones flying overhead. It may be the case then that this frequent exposure to stress lessens their reactions and recovery times – the same experiment would of course need to be repeated on bears living in an environment without any human presence to confirm this.

This is another reason for why further investigations are needed. UAVs have been attractive to researchers and wildlife managers because they can access animals in hard-to-access terrain at a lower cost than traditional aerial methods. Instead, they noted that more research should be done on how much of an impact do UAV flights have on wildlife, given the huge surge of users across the world that adopt this new kind of hobby.

Ditmer and his colleagues noticed the heart-rate spike while studying bear hibernation.