Ecotourism May Put Wild Animals at Risk as the Business Booms

Still, Blumstein argues: “This massive amount of nature-based and eco-tourism can be added to the long list of drivers of human-induced rapid environmental change”. “If this bravado move to true hunters, then they will be expected to be impacted much higher death rate once they meet up with realistic predators”, he explained.

“That’s like each human on Earth visited a protected area once a year”, described Blumstein.

Wildlife scientists discovered that animals such as black-footed penguins, Barbary apes, and gorillas are more susceptible to ecotourism because they have a strong tendency to become at ease with human visitors. In all three cases, regular interactions between people and animals may lead to habituation, leading to a kind of taming.

By being aware of humans around, a few animals such as monkeys can let their guard down and the leave them at the mercy of stalking carnivores American researchers are warning about the “taming” effect after comparing the impacts of ecotourism with animal domestication and urbanisation. But while their dollars help pay for conservation, these “invasive” trips often do more harm than good because they “domesticate” local animals, putting them at greater risk of being eaten, research says.

The researcher also feels that the presence of humans might discourage natural predators and hence make smaller animals bold as well. And in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, elk and pronghorn in areas with more tourists spend less time at alert and more time feeding, the report notes.

Evidence from domesticated silver foxes to goldfish had shown that animals living in close proximity to humans become less wary of predators. He added that it is important to understand how various species in different situations respond to human interaction and what conditions may place these wild animals at risk.

Blumstein says the new report sets out “a new way of thinking about possible long-term effects of nature-based tourism and encourages scientists and reserve managers to take into account these deleterious impacts to assess the sustainability of a type of tourism, which typically aims to enhance, not deplete, biodiversity”.

The researchers found that positive interactions between animals and humans could be just as bad for wildlife as obviously negative ones.

“Even a small human-induced perturbation could affect the behaviour or population biology of a species and influence its function in its community”. As a result, their response to ostensibly harmless tourists and definitely harmful poachers tends to be affected, with their responsiveness to animal predator attacks also turned rusty.

They warned: “We know that humans are able to drive rapid change in other species”.